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Leveraging Automated Unit Tests for Unsupervised Code Translation

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arxiv 2110.06773 v2 pith:3263MCXK submitted 2021-10-13 cs.SE cs.CLcs.LG

Leveraging Automated Unit Tests for Unsupervised Code Translation

classification cs.SE cs.CLcs.LG
keywords translationunsupervisedcodeautomateddatalanguagelanguagesmethods
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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With little to no parallel data available for programming languages, unsupervised methods are well-suited to source code translation. However, the majority of unsupervised machine translation approaches rely on back-translation, a method developed in the context of natural language translation and one that inherently involves training on noisy inputs. Unfortunately, source code is highly sensitive to small changes; a single token can result in compilation failures or erroneous programs, unlike natural languages where small inaccuracies may not change the meaning of a sentence. To address this issue, we propose to leverage an automated unit-testing system to filter out invalid translations, thereby creating a fully tested parallel corpus. We found that fine-tuning an unsupervised model with this filtered data set significantly reduces the noise in the translations so-generated, comfortably outperforming the state-of-the-art for all language pairs studied. In particular, for Java $\to$ Python and Python $\to$ C++ we outperform the best previous methods by more than 16% and 24% respectively, reducing the error rate by more than 35%.

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