Using machine translation for converting Python 2 to Python 3 code
Open accessAbstract
In this paper, we have tried to use statistical machine translation in order to convert Python 2 code to Python 3 code. We use data from two projects and achieve a high BLEU score. We also investigate the cross-project training and testing to analyze the errors so as to ascertain differences with previous case. We have described a pilot study on modeling programming languages as natural language to build translation models on the lines of natural languages. This can be further worked on to translate between versions of a programming language or cross-programming-languages code translation.
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Code translation facilitates refactoring outdated languages, transitions to faster languages, and supports programming language migration.
“It facilitates the refactoring of code written in outdated languages [10], transitions from simpler but slower languages to more complex and faster ones [11], and supports programming language migration in software development [12]-[19].”
From RepoTransBench: A Real-World Multilingual Benchmark for Repository-Level Code Translation (2026) · cites this paper as [10]
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A 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 · see citing works
Leveraging automated unit tests for unsupervised code translation
Roziere, B., Zhang, J. M., Charton, F., Harman, M., Synnaeve, G., & Lample, G. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.06773 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
RepoTransBench: A Real-World Multilingual Benchmark for Repository-Level Code Translation
Wang, Y., Wang, Y., Wang, S., Guo, D., Chen, J., Grundy, J., Liu, X., Ma, Y., Mao, M., Zhang, H., et al. (2026) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2025.3645056 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
“It facilitates the refactoring of code written in outdated languages [10], transitions from simpler but slower languages to more complex and faster ones [11], and supports programming language migration in software development [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19].”
Influential
- Authors
- Aggarwal, K., Salameh, M., & Hindle, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Alberta (CA)
- Publisher
- PeerJ
- Published
- 2015-10-29
- OpenAlex
- W1846534677
- Cited by
- 20
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 3 · 2018: 1
- Type
- posted content
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Translation Studies and Practices
- Keywords
- statistical machine translation, program translation, programming language translation, BLEU evaluation
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