{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/neural-code-search-revisited-enhancing-code","title":"Neural Code Search Revisited: Enhancing Code Snippet Retrieval through Natural Language Intent","arxiv_id":"2008.12193","date":"2020-08-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Geert Heyman","Tom Van Cutsem"],"abstract":"In this work, we propose and study annotated code search: the retrieval of code snippets paired with brief descriptions of their intent using natural language queries. On three benchmark datasets, we investigate how code retrieval systems can be improved by leveraging descriptions to better capture the intents of code snippets. Building on recent progress in transfer learning and natural language processing, we create a domain-specific retrieval model for code annotated with a natural language description. We find that our model yields significantly more relevant search results (with absolute gains up to 20.6% in mean reciprocal rank) compared to state-of-the-art code retrieval methods that do not use descriptions but attempt to compute the intent of snippets solely from unannotated code.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.12193v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.12193v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"neural-code-search-revisited-enhancing-code","repo_url":"https://github.com/nokia/codesearch","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"annotated-code-search","task_name":"Annotated Code Search"},{"task_slug":"code-search","task_name":"Code Search"},{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"natural-language-queries","task_name":"Natural Language Queries"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-conala","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-CoNaLa","model":"Ensemble:USE-tuned+NCS","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.351"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-conala","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-CoNaLa","model":"USE-tuned","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.340"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-conala","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-CoNaLa","model":"USE","rank_in_archive_order":3,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.181"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-conala","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-CoNaLa","model":"NCS","rank_in_archive_order":4,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.167"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-so-ds","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-SO-DS","model":"Ensemble:USE-tuned+NCS","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.323"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-so-ds","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-SO-DS","model":"USE-tuned","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.304"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-so-ds","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-SO-DS","model":"USE","rank_in_archive_order":3,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.244"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-so-ds","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-SO-DS","model":"NCS","rank_in_archive_order":4,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.113"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-staqc-py","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-StaQC-py","model":"Ensemble:USE-tuned+NCS","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.126"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-staqc-py","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-StaQC-py","model":"USE-tuned","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.117"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-staqc-py","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-StaQC-py","model":"USE","rank_in_archive_order":3,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.104"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/annotated-code-search-on-pacs-staqc-py","task":"Annotated Code Search","dataset":"PACS-StaQC-py","model":"NCS","rank_in_archive_order":4,"of":4,"metrics":{"MRR":"0.030"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2008.12193","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}