Syntax errors just aren't natural: improving error reporting with language models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A frustrating aspect of software development is that compiler error messages often fail to locate the actual cause of a syntax error. An errant semicolon or brace can result in many errors reported throughout the file. We seek to find the actual source of these syntax errors by relying on the consistency of software: valid source code is usually repetitive and unsurprising. We exploit this consistency by constructing a simple N-gram language model of lexed source code tokens. We implemented an automatic Java syntax-error locator using the corpus of the project itself and evaluated its performance on mutated source code from several projects. Our tool, trained on the past versions of a project, can effectively augment the syntax error locations produced by the native compiler. Thus we provide a methodology and tool that exploits the naturalness of software source code to detect syntax errors alongside the parser.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.106 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".