Exploring Dynamic Selection of Branch Expansion Orders for Code Generation

Hui Jiang, Chulun Zhou, Fandong Meng, Biao Zhang, Jie Zhou, Degen Huang, Qingqiang Wu, Jinsong Su


Abstract
Due to the great potential in facilitating software development, code generation has attracted increasing attention recently. Generally, dominant models are Seq2Tree models, which convert the input natural language description into a sequence of tree-construction actions corresponding to the pre-order traversal of an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). However, such a traversal order may not be suitable for handling all multi-branch nodes. In this paper, we propose to equip the Seq2Tree model with a context-based Branch Selector, which is able to dynamically determine optimal expansion orders of branches for multi-branch nodes. Particularly, since the selection of expansion orders is a non-differentiable multi-step operation, we optimize the selector through reinforcement learning, and formulate the reward function as the difference of model losses obtained through different expansion orders. Experimental results and in-depth analysis on several commonly-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach. We have released our code at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/CG-RL.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.394
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5076–5085
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.394
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.394
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hui Jiang, Chulun Zhou, Fandong Meng, Biao Zhang, Jie Zhou, Degen Huang, Qingqiang Wu, and Jinsong Su. 2021. Exploring Dynamic Selection of Branch Expansion Orders for Code Generation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5076–5085, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Dynamic Selection of Branch Expansion Orders for Code Generation (Jiang et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.394.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.394.mp4
Code
 DeepLearnXMU/CG-RL
Data
CoNaLa