Department of Computer Science

Machine Learning Research Group

University of Texas at Austin Artificial Intelligence Lab

Publications: Natural Language for Software Engineering

The ability to translate instructions expressed in natural language directly to executable software is of considerable use in many applications such as personal assistants, as well as in making computers and automated systems more accessible to users unfamiliar with computer programming. Our work has focused on using semantic parsing and dialog to interpret English "if this then that" (IFTTT) instructions and using the evolution of comments and code in open source software repositories and a combination of NLP and program analysis methods to automate various software engineering tasks.

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  1. Explaining Competitive-Level Programming Solutions using LLMs
    [Details] [PDF] [Poster]
    Jierui Li, Szymon Tworkowski, Yingying Wu, Raymond Mooney
    In Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations Workshop, July 2023.
  2. Learning Deep Semantics for Test Completion
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PDF)]
    Pengyu Nie, Rahul Banerjee, Junyi Jessy Li, Raymond Mooney and Milos Gligoric
    International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2023.
  3. Using Developer Discussions to Guide Fixing Bugs in Software
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PDF)] [Video]
    Sheena Panthaplackel, Milos Gligoric, Junyi Jessy Li, Raymond J. Mooney
    In Findings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), December 2022.
  4. Facilitating Software Evolution through Natural Language Comments and Dialogue
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PDF)]
    Sheena Panthaplackel
    PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, UT Austin, August 2022.
  5. Learning to Describe Solutions for Bug Reports Based on Developer Discussions
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PDF)] [Poster] [Video]
    Sheena Panthaplackel, Junyi Jessy Li, Milos Gligoric, Raymond J. Mooney
    In Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), May 2022.
  6. Impact of Evaluation Methodologies on Code Summarization
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PDF)] [Poster] [Video]
    Pengyu Nie and Jiyang Zhang and Junyi Jessy Li and Raymond J. Mooney and Milos Gligoric
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, May 2022.
  7. Facilitating Software Evolution through Natural Language Comments and Dialogue
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PDF)] [Video]
    Sheena Panthaplackel
    October 2021. Ph.D. Proposal.
  8. Copy That! Editing Sequences by Copying Spans
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PPT)] [Slides (PDF)] [Poster]
    Sheena Panthaplackel, Miltiadis Allamanis, Marc Brockschmidt
    In The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), February 2021.
  9. Deep Just-In-Time Inconsistency Detection Between Comments and Source Code
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PDF)] [Poster] [Video]
    Sheena Panthaplackel, Junyi Jessy Li, Milos Gligoric, Raymond J. Mooney
    In The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), February 2021.
  10. Learning to Update Natural Language Comments Based on Code Changes
    [Details] [PDF] [Video]
    Sheena Panthaplackel, Pengyu Nie, Milos Gligoric, Junyi Jessy Li, and Raymond J. Mooney
    In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), July 2020.
  11. Associating Natural Language Comment and Source Code Entities
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PDF)] [Poster]
    Sheena Panthaplackel, Milos Gligoric, Raymond J. Mooney and Junyi Jessy Li
    In The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), February 2020.
  12. A Framework for Writing Trigger - Action Todo Comments in Executable Format
    [Details] [PDF] [Slides (PPT)]
    Pengyu Nie, Rishabh Rai, Junyi Jessy Li, Sarfraz Khurshid, Raymond J. Mooney, Milos Gligoric
    In Proceedings of the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Tallinn, Estonia, August 2019. Distinguished Paper Award.
  13. AInix: An open platform for natural language interfaces to shell commands
    [Details] [PDF]
    David Gros
    May 2019. Undergraduate Honors Thesis, Computer Science Department, University of Texas at Austin.
  14. Natural Language Processing and Program Analysis for Supporting Todo Comments as Software Evolves
    [Details] [PDF]
    Pengyu Nie, Junyi Jessy Li, Sarfraz Khurshid, Raymond Mooney, Milos Gligoric
    In In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on NLP for Software Engineering, February 2018.
  15. Dialog for Language to Code
    [Details] [PDF] [Poster]
    Shobhit Chaurasia and Raymond J. Mooney
    In Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-17), 175-180, Taipei, Taiwan, November 2017.
  16. Dialog for Natural Language to Code
    [Details] [PDF]
    Shobhit Chaurasia
    2017. Masters Thesis, Computer Science Department, University of Texas at Austin.
  17. Improved Semantic Parsers For If-Then Statements
    [Details] [PDF]
    I. Beltagy and Chris Quirk
    To Appear In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-16), Berlin, Germany, 2016.
  18. Language to Code: Learning Semantic Parsers for If-This-Then-That Recipes
    [Details] [PDF] [Poster]
    Chris Quirk and Raymond Mooney and Michel Galley
    In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-15), 878--888, Beijing, China, July 2015.