NomNom: Explanatory Function Names for Program Synthesizers

Amirmohammad Nazari, Souti Chattopadhyay, Swabha Swayamdipta, Mukund Raghothaman

Abstract: Despite great advances in program synthesis techniques, they remain algorithmic black boxes. Although they guarantee that when synthesis is successful, the implementation satisfies the specification, they provide no additional information regarding how the implementation works or the manner in which the specification is realized. One possibility to answer these questions is to use large language models to construct human-readable explanations. Unfortunately, experiments reveal that LLMs frequently produce nonsensical or misleading explanations when applied to the unidiomatic code produced by program synthesizers. In this paper, we develop an approach to reliably augment the implementation with explanatory names. Experiments and user studies indicate that these names help users in understanding synthesized implementations.