Code Representation Learning Using Prüfer Sequences (Student Abstract)

No. 11: IAAI-22, EAAI-22, AAAI-22 Special Programs and Special Track, Student Papers and Demonstrations

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36

AAAI Student Abstract and Poster Program

An effective and efficient encoding of the source code of a computer program is critical to the success of sequence-to-sequence deep neural network models for code representation learning. In this study, we propose to use the Prufer sequence of the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of a computer program to design a sequential representation scheme that preserves the structural information in an AST. Our representation makes it possible to develop deep-learning models in which signals carried by lexical tokens in the training examples can be exploited automatically and selectively based on their syntactic role and importance. Unlike other recently-proposed approaches, our representation is concise and lossless in terms of the structural information of the AST. Results from our experiment show that prufer-sequence-based representation is indeed highly effective and efficient.

10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21625