Function Assistant: A Tool for NL Querying of APIs
This tool addresses the problem of efficiently navigating APIs for end-users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing semantic parsing methods.
The paper introduces Function Assistant, a Python toolkit that uses natural language queries to help users find functions in API source code repositories, applying semantic parsing to translate queries into API representations. It demonstrates the tool's application on 27 Python projects from GitHub.
In this paper, we describe Function Assistant, a lightweight Python-based toolkit for querying and exploring source code repositories using natural language. The toolkit is designed to help end-users of a target API quickly find information about functions through high-level natural language queries and descriptions. For a given text query and background API, the tool finds candidate functions by performing a translation from the text to known representations in the API using the semantic parsing approach of Richardson and Kuhn (2017). Translations are automatically learned from example text-code pairs in example APIs. The toolkit includes features for building translation pipelines and query engines for arbitrary source code projects. To explore this last feature, we perform new experiments on 27 well-known Python projects hosted on Github.