A Hypothesis Testing-based Framework for Software Cross-modal Retrieval in Heterogeneous Semantic Spaces

Abstract

Software cross-modal retrieval is a popular yet challenging direction, such as bug localization and code search. Previous studies generally map natural language texts and codes into a homogeneous semantic space for similarity measurement. However, it is not easy to accurately capture their similar semantics in a homogeneous semantic space due to the semantic gap. Therefore, we propose to map the multi-modal data into heterogeneous semantic spaces to capture their unique semantics. Specifically, we propose a novel software cross-modal retrieval framework named Deep Hypothesis Testing (DeepHT). In DeepHT, to capture the unique semantics of the code’s control flow structure, all control flow paths (CFPs) in the control flow graph are mapped to a CFP sample set in the sample space. Meanwhile, the text is mapped to a CFP correlation distribution in the distribution space to model its correlation with different CFPs. The matching score is calculated according to how well the sample set obeys the distribution using hypothesis testing. The experimental results on two text-to-code retrieval tasks (i.e., bug localization and code search) and two code-to-text retrieval tasks (i.e., vulnerability knowledge retrieval and historical patch retrieval) show that DeepHT outperforms the baseline methods.