Joint Embedding of Semantic and Statistical Features for Effective Code Search

Abstract

Code search is an important approach to improve effectiveness and efficiency of software development. The current studies commonly search target code based on either semantic or statistical information in large datasets. Semantic and statistical information have hidden relationships between them since they describe code snippets from different perspectives. In this work, we propose a joint embedding model of semantic and statistical features to improve the effectiveness of code annotation. Then, we implement a code search engine, i.e., JessCS, based on the joint embedding model. We evaluate JessCS on more than 1 million lines of code snippets and corresponding descriptions. The experimental results show that JessCS performs more effective than UNIF-based approach, with at least 13% improvements on the studied metrics.