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Reading StackOverflow Encourages Cheating: Adding Question Text Improves Extractive Code Generation

8 Jun 2021ACL (NLP4Prog) 2021 8arXiv:2106.04447archive 2025-07-28

Gabriel Orlanski, Alex Gittens

Answering a programming question using only its title is difficult as salient contextual information is omitted. Based on this observation, we present a corpus of over 40,000 StackOverflow question texts to be used in conjunction with their corresponding intents from the CoNaLa dataset (Yin et al., 2018). Using both the intent and question body, we use BART to establish a baseline BLEU score of 34.35 for this new task. We find further improvements of 2.8% by combining the mined CoNaLa data with the labeled data to achieve a 35.32 BLEU score. We evaluate prior state-of-the-art CoNaLa models with this additional data and find that our proposed method of using the body and mined data beats the BLEU score of the prior state-of-the-art by 71.96%. Finally, we perform ablations to demonstrate that BART is an unsupervised multimodal learner and examine its extractive behavior. The code and data can be found https://github.com/gabeorlanski/stackoverflow-encourages-cheating.

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Code

gabeorlanski/stackoverflow-encourages-cheating officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

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Tasks

Code Generation

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

CoNaLa-Ext

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Code Generation CoNaLa BART W/ Mined BLEU 30.55 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Code Generation CoNaLa BART Base BLEU 26.24 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Code Generation CoNaLa-Ext BART W/ Mined BLEU 35.32 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Code Generation CoNaLa-Ext BART Base BLEU 34.35 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

AdamAttentionBARTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmax

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