An Intelligent Code Search Approach Using Hybrid Encoders

Abstract

The intelligent code search with natural language queries has become an important researching area in software engineering. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework At-CodeSM for source code search. The powerful code encoder in At-CodeSM, which is implemented with an abstract syntax tree parsing algorithm (Tree-LSTM) and token-level encoders, maintains both the lexical and structural features of source code in the process of code vectorizing. Both the representative and discriminative models are implemented with deep neural networks. Our experiments on the CodeSearchNet dataset show that At-CodeSM yields better performance in the task of intelligent code searching than previous approaches.