Can Neural Networks Understand Programs like Humans?

Anonymous

Abstract: Program understanding is a fundamental task in program language processing. Despite the success, existing works fail to take human minds as reference in understanding programs. In this paper, we incorporate human minds and propose the PGNN-EK model that consists of two main components. On the one hand, inspired by the “divide-and-conquer” reading behaviours of humans, we present a partitioning-based graph neural network model PGNN on the upgraded AST of codes. On the other hand, to characterize human minds of resorting to other resources to help code comprehension, we transform raw codes with external knowledge and apply pre-training techniques for information extraction. Finally, we combine the two embeddings generated from the two components to output code embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superior performance of PGNN-EK on the code summarization and code clone detection tasks. In particular, to show the generalization ability of our model, we release a new dataset that is more challenging for code clone detection and could advance the development of the community. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/anonymousforpaper1997/PGNN-EK.