Multi-modal Neural Representations for Semantic Code Search

Abstract: In recent decades, various software systems have gradually become the basis of our society. Programmers search existing code snippets from time to time in their daily life. It would be beneficial and meaningful to have better solutions for the task of semantic code search, which is to find the most semantically relevant code snippets for a given query. Our approach is to introduce tree representations by multi-modal learning. The core idea is to enrich semantic information for code snippets by preparing data of different modalities, and meanwhile ignore syntactic information. We design one novel tree structure named Simplified Semantic Tree and then extract RootPath representations from that. We utilize RootPath representation to complement the conventional sequential representation, namely the token sequence of the code snippet. Our multi-modal model receives code-query pair as input and computes similarity score as output, following the pseudo-siamese architecture. For each pair, besides the ready-made code sequence and query sequence, we extra one extra tree sequence from Simplified Semantic Tree. There are three encoders in our model, and they respectively encode these three sequences as vectors of the same length. Then we combine the code vector with the tree vector for one joint vector, which is still of the same length, as the multi-modal representation for the code snippet. We introduce triplet loss to ensure vectors of code and query in the same pair be close at the shared vector space. We conduct experiments in one large-scale multi-language corpus, with comparisons of strong baseline models by specified performance metrics. Among baseline models, the simplest Neural Bag-of-Words model is with the most satisfying performance. It indicates that syntactic information is likely to distract complex models from critical semantic information. Results show that our multi-modal representation approach performs better because it surpasses baseline models by far in most cases. The key to our multi-modal model is that it is totally about semantic information, and it learns from data of multiple modalities.