Program Language Translation Using a Grammar-Driven Tree-to-Tree Model

Anonymous

Abstract: The task of translating between programming languages differs from the challenge of translating natural languages in that programming languages are designed with a far more rigid set of structural and grammatical rules. Previous work has used a tree-to-tree encoder/decoder model to take advantage of the inherent tree structure of programs during translation. Neural decoders, however, by default do not exploit known grammar rules of the target language. In this paper, we describe a tree decoder that leverages knowledge of a language's grammar rules to exclusively generate syntactically correct programs. We find that this grammar-based tree-to-tree model outperforms the state of the art tree-to-tree model in translating between two programming languages on a previously used synthetic task.

TL;DR: The goal of this paper is to extend prior work on programming language translation using tree to tree models to incorporate knowledge of the grammar in the decoder.

Keywords: Machine Learning, Program Translation, Neural Networks, Tree Model, Encoder Decoder, NAMPI