Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2024

Abstract

Modern integrated development environments (IDEs) provide various automated code suggestion techniques (e.g., code completion and code generation) to help developers improve their efficiency. Such techniques may retrieve similar code snippets from the code base or leverage deep learning models to provide code suggestions. However, how to effectively enhance the code suggestions using code retrieval has not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we study and explore a retrieval-augmented framework for code suggestions. Specifically, our framework leverages different retrieval approaches and search strategies to search similar code snippets. Then the retrieved code is used to further enhance the performance of language models on code suggestions. We conduct experiments by integrating different language models into our framework and compare the results with their original models. We find that our framework noticeably improves the performance of both code completion and code generation by up to 53.8% and 130.8% in terms of BLEU-4, respectively. Our study highlights that integrating the retrieval process into code suggestions can improve the performance of code suggestions by a large margin.

Keywords

Code Suggestion, Code Search, Language Model

Discipline

Programming Languages and Compilers | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ICSE '24: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering, Lisbon, Portugal, April 14-20

First Page

1

Last Page

13

ISBN

9798400702174

Identifier

10.1145/3597503.363908

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3597503.363908

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