The DOI matches its Crossref record; 3 of the 3 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
On the "naturalness" of buggy code
Open accessAbstract
Real software, the kind working programmers produce by the kLOC to solve real-world problems, tends to be "natural", like speech or natural language; it tends to be highly repetitive and predictable. Researchers have captured this naturalness of software through statistical models and used them to good effect in suggestion engines, porting tools, coding standards checkers, and idiom miners. This suggests that code that appears improbable, or surprising, to a good statistical language model is "unnatural" in some sense, and thus possibly suspicious. In this paper, we investigate this hypothesis. We consider a large corpus of bug fix commits (ca. 7,139), from 10 different Java projects, and focus on its language statistics, evaluating the naturalness of buggy code and the corresponding fixes. We find that code with bugs tends to be more entropic (i.e. unnatural), becoming less so as bugs are fixed. Ordering files for inspection by their average entropy yields cost-effectiveness scores comparable to popular defect prediction methods. At a finer granularity, focusing on highly entropic lines is similar in cost-effectiveness to some well-known static bug finders (PMD, FindBugs) and ordering warnings from these bug finders using an entropy measure improves the cost-effectiveness of inspecting code implicated in warnings. This suggests that entropy may be a valid, simple way to complement the effectiveness of PMD or FindBugs, and that search-based bug-fixing methods may benefit from using entropy both for fault-localization and searching for fixes.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm
Kschischang, F. R., Frey, B. J., & Loeliger, H.-A. (2001) · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory · doi:10.1109/18.910572 · Cited by 6,486 · cited 1×
“present a framework based on a probabilistic model (namely, factor graph [31]) for automatically inferring specifications from programs and use it to find missing and incorrect properties in a specification used by a commercial static bug-finding tool [30].”
MethodUse of relative code churn measures to predict system defect density
Nagappan, N., & Ball, T. (2005) · Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering - ICSE '05 · doi:10.1145/1062455.1062514 · Cited by 775
Tu, Z., Su, Z., & Devanbu, P. (2014) · Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/2635868.2635875 · Cited by 238 · cited 5×
“’s cache-based language model ($gram) tool [53], as described in Section 2.”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialSelf-citation
Cited by
Unified Pre-training for Program Understanding and Generation
Ahmad, W., Chakraborty, S., Ray, B., & Chang, K.-W. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies · doi:10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.211 · Cited by 642
Self-citationCodeXGLUE: A Machine Learning Benchmark Dataset for Code Understanding and Generation
Lu, S., Guo, D., Ren, S., Huang, J., Svyatkovskiy, A., Blanco, A., Clement, C., Drain, D., Jiang, D., Tang, D., et al. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2102.04664 · Cited by 536
Le Goues, C., Pradel, M., & Roychoudhury, A. (2019) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/3318162 · Cited by 410
Are deep neural networks the best choice for modeling source code?
Hellendoorn, V. J., & Devanbu, P. (2017) · Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3106237.3106290 · Cited by 292
Self-citationBig code != big vocabulary: open-vocabulary models for source code
Karampatsis, R.-M., Babii, H., Robbes, R., Sutton, C., & Janes, A. (2020) · Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3377811.3380342 · Cited by 182
Predicting Defective Lines Using a Model-Agnostic Technique
Wattanakriengkrai, S., Thongtanunam, P., Tantithamthavorn, C., Hata, H., & Matsumoto, K. (2022) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2020.3023177 · Cited by 137
Perfection Not Required? Human-AI Partnerships in Code Translation
Weisz, J. D., Muller, M., Houde, S., Richards, J., Ross, S. I., Martinez, F., Agarwal, M., & Talamadupula, K. (2021) · 26th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces · doi:10.1145/3397481.3450656 · Cited by 129
NatGen: generative pre-training by “naturalizing” source code
Chakraborty, S., Ahmed, T., Ding, Y., Devanbu, P. T., & Ray, B. (2022) · Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3540250.3549162 · Cited by 105
Self-citationA Survey of Machine Learning for Big Code and Naturalness
Allamanis, M., Barr, E. T., Devanbu, P., & Sutton, C. (2019) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3212695 · Cited by 150
When Code Completion Fails: A Case Study on Real-World Completions
Hellendoorn, V. J., Proksch, S., Gall, H. C., & Bacchelli, A. (2019) · 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) · doi:10.1109/icse.2019.00101 · Cited by 76
Self-citationMenzies, T. (2020) · IEEE Software · doi:10.1109/ms.2019.2954841 · Cited by 43
(2020) · doi:10.1145/3379597.3387491 · Cited by 24
Toward a Theory of Causation for Interpreting Neural Code Models
Nader Palacio, D., Velasco, A., Cooper, N., Rodriguez, A., Moran, K., & Poshyvanyk, D. (2024) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2024.3379943 · Cited by 18
Entropy Guided Spectrum Based Bug Localization Using Statistical Language Model
Chakraborty, S., Li, Y., Irvine, M., Saha, R., & Ray, B. (2018) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1802.06947 · Cited by 7
“Previously, Ray et al. [45] and Wang et al. [54] demonstrated that unnaturalness of code elements (measured in terms of entropy) correlate with bug-giness.”
BackgroundMethodResultInfluentialSelf-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Ray, B., Hellendoorn, V., Godhane, S., Tu, Z., Bacchelli, A., & Devanbu, P.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2016-05-14
- Pages
- 428-439
- ISSN
- 0270-5257 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1771830246
- Cited by
- 252
- References
- 3
- FWCI
- 23.36
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
