# Function Assistant: A Tool for NL Querying of APIs

## TL;DR

Function Assistant is a Python toolkit that enables users to query and explore source code repositories using natural language, facilitating easier access to API functions through semantic parsing.

## Contribution

This paper introduces a lightweight, adaptable toolkit that leverages semantic parsing to translate natural language queries into API function searches, with experiments on multiple Python projects.

## Key findings

- Effective translation from natural language to API functions
- Supports arbitrary source code projects with customizable pipelines
- Demonstrated utility on 27 Python projects

## Abstract

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.