A Natural Language Interface for Code Search

Markus Kimmig (1) , Martin Monperrus (2, 3) , Mira Mezini (4)

1 TU Darmstadt - Technische Universität Darmstadt - Technical University of Darmstadt
2 ADAM - Adaptive Distributed Applications and Middleware
3 Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies
4 Software Technology Group [Darmstadt]

One common task of developing or maintaining software is searching the source code for information like specific method calls or write accesses to certain fields. This kind of information is required to correctly implement new features and to solve bugs. This paper presents an approach for querying source code with a natural language interface. It enables the developer to execute a huge range of precise searches while being as easy and intuitive to use as writing natural language. The evaluation shows that the prototype implementation, integrated with the Eclipse development environment for Java, supports a wide range of queries and is able to correctly understand most real developer queries.

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Markus Kimmig, Martin Monperrus, Mira Mezini. A Natural Language Interface for Code Search. [Technical Report] hal-01094267, TU Darmstadt. 2011. ⟨hal-01094267⟩