Collaborative Research: SHF: Medium: Towards More Human-like AI Models of Source Code

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The research objective of this project is to design novel artificial intelligence-based models of software that learn from and are informed by human behavior. The frontier of many areas of Software Engineering (SE) research involves applications of AI-based models to SE tasks. Many tasks in SE research rely on the same basic underpinning technologies, often a neural representation of source code that is trained to find features in code, which are then used for various tasks e.g., to predict words for a document or areas of code likely to contain a bug. While the first applications of recurrent neural network-based encoder-decoder models were a paradigm shift over the manually-crafted heuristics and rules that the neural models replaced, subsequent changes have yielded less improvement despite increased sophistication.The vision of this project is to achieve a breakthrough in more human-like neural models of source code. Its aim is to advance a broad spectrum of SE research tasks that rely on neural models, by improving the neural models of code that underpin many downstream tasks. The research plan is three-fold: First, the project will characterize human behavior during different SE tasks via eye-tracking and IDE-based experiments. Second, the project will design models that predict or even mimic human behavior. Third, the project will use those models to augment and improve neural representations of source code, and evaluate these new representations in a variety of SE tasks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.