Mengnan Qi

Also published as: MengNan Qi


2023

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Program Translation via Code Distillation
Yufan Huang | Mengnan Qi | Yongqiang Yao | Maoquan Wang | Bin Gu | Colin Clement | Neel Sundaresan
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Software version migration and program translation are an important and costly part of the lifecycle of large codebases. Traditional machine translation relies on parallel corpora for supervised translation, which is not feasible for program translation due to a dearth of aligned data. Recent unsupervised neural machine translation techniques have overcome data limitations by included techniques such as back translation and low level compiler intermediate representations (IR). These methods face significant challenges due to the noise in code snippet alignment and the diversity of IRs respectively. In this paper we propose a novel model called Code Distillation (CoDist) whereby we capture the semantic and structural equivalence of code in a language agnostic intermediate representation. Distilled code serves as a translation pivot for any programming language, leading by construction to parallel corpora which scale to all available source code by simply applying the distillation compiler. We demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on CodeXGLUE and TransCoder GeeksForGeeks translation benchmarks, with an average absolute increase of 12.7% on the TransCoder GeeksforGeeks translation benchmark compare to TransCoder-ST.

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SUT: Active Defects Probing for Transcompiler Models
Mengnan Qi | Yufan Huang | Maoquan Wang | Yongqiang Yao | Zihan Liu | Bin Gu | Colin Clement | Neel Sundaresan
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Automatic Program translation has enormous application value and hence has been attracting significant interest from AI researchers. However, we observe that current program translation models still make elementary syntax errors, particularly, when the target language does not have syntax elements in the source language. Metrics like BLUE, CodeBLUE and computation accuracy may not expose these issues. In this paper we introduce a new metrics for programming language translation and these metrics address these basic syntax errors. We develop a novel active defects probing suite called Syntactic Unit Tests (SUT) which includes a highly interpretable evaluation harness for accuracy and test scoring. Experiments have shown that even powerful models like ChatGPT still make mistakes on these basic unit tests. Specifically, compared to previous program translation task evaluation dataset, its pass rate on our unit tests has decreased by 26.15%. Further our evaluation harness reveal syntactic element errors in which these models exhibit deficiencies.

2021

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Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Hierarchical Pretraining and Topic Segment
MengNan Qi | Hao Liu | YuZhuo Fu | Ting Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

With the increasing abundance of meeting transcripts, meeting summary has attracted more and more attention from researchers. The unsupervised pre-training method based on transformer structure combined with fine-tuning of downstream tasks has achieved great success in the field of text summarization. However, the semantic structure and style of meeting transcripts are quite different from that of articles. In this work, we propose a hierarchical transformer encoder-decoder network with multi-task pre-training. Specifically, we mask key sentences at the word-level encoder and generate them at the decoder. Besides, we randomly mask some of the role alignments in the input text and force the model to recover the original role tags to complete the alignments. In addition, we introduce a topic segmentation mechanism to further improve the quality of the generated summaries. The experimental results show that our model is superior to the previous methods in meeting summary datasets AMI and ICSI.