A Deep Learning based Approach to Argument Recommendation

Code completion is one of the most useful features provided by advanced IDEs and is widely used by software developers. However, as a kind of code completion, recommending arguments for method calls is less used. Most of existing argument recommendation approaches provide a long list of syntactically correct candidate arguments, which is difficult for software engineers to select the correct arguments from the long list. To this end, we propose a deep learning based approach to recommending arguments instantly when programmers type in method names they intend to invoke. First, we extract context information from a large corpus of opensource applications. Second, we preprocess the extracted dataset, which involves natural language processing and data embedding. Third, we feed the preprocessed dataset to a specially designed convolutional neural network to rank and recommend actual arguments. With the resulting CNN model trained with sample applications, we can sort the candidate arguments in a reasonable order and recommend the first one as the correct argument. We evaluate the proposed approach on 100 open-source Java applications. Results suggest that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-theart approaches in recommending arguments.