Papers › Python Code Generation by Asking Clarification Questions
Python Code Generation by Asking Clarification Questions
Haau-Sing Li, Mohsen Mesgar, André F. T. Martins, Iryna Gurevych
Code generation from text requires understanding the user's intent from a natural language description and generating an executable code snippet that satisfies this intent. While recent pretrained language models demonstrate remarkable performance for this task, these models fail when the given natural language description is under-specified. In this work, we introduce a novel and more realistic setup for this task. We hypothesize that the under-specification of a natural language description can be resolved by asking clarification questions. Therefore, we collect and introduce a new dataset named CodeClarQA containing pairs of natural language descriptions and code with created synthetic clarification questions and answers. The empirical results of our evaluation of pretrained language model performance on code generation show that clarifications result in more precisely generated code, as shown by the substantial improvement of model performance in all evaluation metrics. Alongside this, our task and dataset introduce new challenges to the community, including when and what clarification questions should be asked. Our code and dataset are available on GitHub.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections