Papers › Incorporating External Knowledge through Pre-training for Natural Language to Code Generation
Incorporating External Knowledge through Pre-training for Natural Language to Code Generation
Frank F. Xu, Zhengbao Jiang, Pengcheng Yin, Bogdan Vasilescu, Graham Neubig
Open-domain code generation aims to generate code in a general-purpose programming language (such as Python) from natural language (NL) intents. Motivated by the intuition that developers usually retrieve resources on the web when writing code, we explore the effectiveness of incorporating two varieties of external knowledge into NL-to-code generation: automatically mined NL-code pairs from the online programming QA forum StackOverflow and programming language API documentation. Our evaluations show that combining the two sources with data augmentation and retrieval-based data re-sampling improves the current state-of-the-art by up to 2.2% absolute BLEU score on the code generation testbed CoNaLa. The code and resources are available at https://github.com/neulab/external-knowledge-codegen.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code Generation | CoNaLa | External Knowledge With API + Reranking | BLEU | 32.26 | #7 of 14 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Code Generation | CoNaLa | External Knowledge With API | BLEU | 30.69 | #8 of 14 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Code Generation | CoNaLa-Ext | External Knowledge With API + Reranking | BLEU | 20.54 | #3 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Code Generation | CoNaLa-Ext | External Knowledge With API | BLEU | 20.37 | #4 of 6 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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