A Language for Function Signature Representations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal language and translation method for representing source code semantics in first-order logic, enhancing the potential for complex natural language understanding in software domains.

Contribution

It formalizes code representation schemes and provides a systematic translation to logic, broadening the scope of semantic parsing in programming language understanding.

Findings

Defines a domain-specific language for code semantics

Provides a translation from code representations to first-order logic

Enables application of logical reasoning to code understanding

Abstract

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.