ALBERT

Description: In recent years, millions of source codes are generated in different languages on a daily basis all over the world. A deep neural network-based intelligent support model for source code completion would be a great advantage in software engineering and programming education fields. Vast numbers of syntax, logical, and other critical errors that cannot be detected by normal compilers continue to exist in source codes, and the development of an intelligent evaluation methodology that does not rely on manual compilation has become essential. Even experienced programmers often find it necessary to analyze an entire program in order to find a single error and are thus being forced to waste valuable time debugging their source codes. With this point in mind, we proposed an intelligent model that is based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and combined it with an attention mechanism for source code completion. Thus, the proposed model can detect source code errors with locations and then predict the correct words. In addition, the proposed model can classify the source codes as to whether they are erroneous or not. We trained our proposed model using the source code and then evaluated the performance. All of the data used in our experiments were extracted from Aizu Online Judge (AOJ) system. The experimental results obtained show that the accuracy in terms of error detection and prediction of our proposed model approximately is 62% and source code classification accuracy is approximately 96% which outperformed a standard LSTM and other state-of-the-art models. Moreover, in comparison to state-of-the-art models, our proposed model achieved an interesting level of success in terms of error detection, prediction, and classification when applied to long source code sequences. Overall, these experimental results indicate the usefulness of our proposed model in software engineering and programming education arena.

Description: The rate of software development has increased dramatically. Conventional compilers cannot assess and detect all source code errors. Software may thus contain errors, negatively affecting end-users. It is also difficult to assess and detect source code logic errors using traditional compilers, resulting in software that contains errors. A method that utilizes artificial intelligence for assessing and detecting errors and classifying source code as correct (error-free) or incorrect is thus required. Here, we propose a sequential language model that uses an attention-mechanism-based long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to assess and classify source code based on the estimated error probability. The attentive mechanism enhances the accuracy of the proposed language model for error assessment and classification. We trained the proposed model using correct source code and then evaluated its performance. The experimental results show that the proposed model has logic and syntax error detection accuracies of 92.2% and 94.8%, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art models. We also applied the proposed model to the classification of source code with logic and syntax errors. The average precision, recall, and F-measure values for such classification are much better than those of benchmark models. To strengthen the proposed model, we combined the attention mechanism with LSTM to enhance the results of error assessment and detection as well as source code classification. Finally, our proposed model can be effective in programming education and software engineering by improving code writing, debugging, error-correction, and reasoning.

Description: Programming is a vital skill in computer science and engineering-related disciplines. However, developing source code is an error-prone task. Logical errors in code are particularly hard to identify for both students and professionals, and a single error is unexpected to end-users. At present, conventional compilers have difficulty identifying many of the errors (especially logical errors) that can occur in code. To mitigate this problem, we propose a language model for evaluating source codes using a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) neural network. We trained the BiLSTM model with a large number of source codes with tuning various hyperparameters. We then used the model to evaluate incorrect code and assessed the model’s performance in three principal areas: source code error detection, suggestions for incorrect code repair, and erroneous code classification. Experimental results showed that the proposed BiLSTM model achieved 50.88% correctness in identifying errors and providing suggestions. Moreover, the model achieved an F-score of approximately 97%, outperforming other state-of-the-art models (recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM)).