Abdelhalim Dahou

Andor Diera, Abdelhalim Dahou, Lukas Galke et al.

Language models can serve as a valuable tool for software developers to increase productivity. Large generative models can be used for code generation and code completion, while smaller encoder-only models are capable of performing code search tasks using natural language queries.These capabilities are heavily influenced by the quality and diversity of the available training data. Source code datasets used for training usually focus on the most popular languages and testing is mostly conducted on the same distributions, often overlooking low-resource programming languages. Motivated by the NLP generalization taxonomy proposed by Hupkes et.\,al., we propose a new benchmark dataset called GenCodeSearchNet (GeCS) which builds upon existing natural language code search datasets to systemically evaluate the programming language understanding generalization capabilities of language models. As part of the full dataset, we introduce a new, manually curated subset StatCodeSearch that focuses on R, a popular but so far underrepresented programming language that is often used by researchers outside the field of computer science. For evaluation and comparison, we collect several baseline results using fine-tuned BERT-style models and GPT-style large language models in a zero-shot setting.

Abdelhalim Dahou, Ansgar Scherp, Sebastian Kurten et al.

Source code segmentation, dividing code into functionally coherent segments, is crucial for knowledge retrieval and maintenance in software development. While enabling efficient navigation and comprehension of large codebases, manual and syntactic analysis approaches have become impractical as repositories grow, especially for low-resource languages like R and their research domains (e.g., social sciences, psychology).This paper introduces an automated, domain-specific approach for research R code segmentation using Large and Small Language Models (LLMs/SLMs). It presents two novel approaches and a human-annotated dataset, StatCodeSeg. We explore two distinct approaches: line-by-line analysis with context and range-based segment determination. We experiment with LLMs and fine-tuned SLMs. To support the generalizability of our approaches, we also include experiments on Python code from the computer science domain.Our results show that context-based line-by-line analysis is superior over range-based segmentation.Using smaller language models like CodeBERT and an encoder-only version of CodeT5+ are better than their LLM counterparts. Most notably, these two best-performing models did not see R code during pre-training versus the LLMs but were only fine-tuned on 4,130 lines of manually annotated code.