A Language for Function Signature Representations
This work provides a formal foundation for existing code datasets, potentially broadening their applicability to complex reasoning tasks in software engineering.
The authors formalized representations from prior semantic parser studies on source code libraries and APIs by introducing a domain-specific language and translating it to first-order logic, aiming to enable more complex natural language understanding and reasoning problems in software.
Recent work by (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a,b; Richardson et al., 2018) looks at semantic parser induction and question answering in the domain of source code libraries and APIs. In this brief note, we formalize the representations being learned in these studies and introduce a simple domain specific language and a systematic translation from this language to first-order logic. By recasting the target representations in terms of classical logic, we aim to broaden the applicability of existing code datasets for investigating more complex natural language understanding and reasoning problems in the software domain.