Representing Programs with Dependency and Function Call Graphs for Learning Hierarchical Embeddings
Vitaly Romanov, Vladimir Vladimirovich Ivanov, Giancarlo Succi · 2020
Any source code can be represented as a graph. This kind of representation allows capturing the interaction between the elements of a program, such as functions, variables, etc. Modeling these interactions can enable us to infer the purpose of a code snippet, a function, or even an entire program. Lately, more and more work appear, where source code is represented in the form of a graph. One of the difficulties in evaluating the usefulness of such representation is the lack of a proper dataset and an evaluation metric. Our contribution is in preparing a dataset that represents programs written in Python and Java source codes in the form of dependency and function call graphs. In this dataset, multiple projects are analyzed and united into a single graph. The nodes of the graph represent the functions, variables, classes, methods, interfaces, etc. Nodes for functions carry information about how these functions are constructed internally, and where they are called from. Such graphs enable training hierarchical vector representations for source code. Moreover, some functions come with textual descriptions (docstrings), which allows learning useful tasks such as API search and generation of documentation.