CKTyper: Enhancing Type Inference for Java Code Snippets by Leveraging Crowdsourcing Knowledge in Stack Overflow
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Code snippets are widely used in technical forums to demonstrate solutions to programming problems. They can be leveraged by developers to accelerate problem-solving. However, code snippets often lack concrete types of the APIs used in them, which impedes their understanding and resue. To enhance the description of a code snippet, a number of approaches are proposed to infer the types of APIs. Although existing approaches can achieve good performance, their performance is limited by ignoring other information outside the input code snippet (e.g., the descriptions of similar code snippets) that could potentially improve the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel type inference approach, named CKTyper, by leveraging crowdsourcing knowledge in technical posts. The key idea is to generate a relevant context for a target code snippet from the posts containing similar code snippets and then employ the context to promote the type inference with large language models (e.g., ChatGPT). More specifically, we build a crowdsourcing knowledge base (CKB) by extracting code snippets from a large set of posts and index the CKB using Lucene. An API type dictionary is also built from a set of API libraries. Given a code snippet to be inferred, we first retrieve a list of similar code snippets from the indexed CKB. Then, we generate a crowdsourcing knowledge context (CKC) by extracting and summarizing useful content (e.g., API-related sentences) in the posts that contain the similar code snippets. The CKC is subsequently used to improve the type inference of ChatGPT on the input code snippet. The hallucination of ChatGPT is eliminated by employing the API type dictionary. Evaluation results on two open-source datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CKTyper. CKTyper achieves the optimal precision/recall of 97.80% and 95.54% on both datasets, respectively, significantly outperforming three state-of-the-art baselines and ChatGPT.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
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".