CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages

Zhangyin Feng, Daya Guo, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Xiaocheng Feng, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Daxin Jiang, Ming Zhou


Abstract
We present CodeBERT, a bimodal pre-trained model for programming language (PL) and natural language (NL). CodeBERT learns general-purpose representations that support downstream NL-PL applications such as natural language code search, code documentation generation, etc. We develop CodeBERT with Transformer-based neural architecture, and train it with a hybrid objective function that incorporates the pre-training task of replaced token detection, which is to detect plausible alternatives sampled from generators. This enables us to utilize both “bimodal” data of NL-PL pairs and “unimodal data, where the former provides input tokens for model training while the latter helps to learn better generators. We evaluate CodeBERT on two NL-PL applications by fine-tuning model parameters. Results show that CodeBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance on both natural language code search and code documentation generation. Furthermore, to investigate what type of knowledge is learned in CodeBERT, we construct a dataset for NL-PL probing, and evaluate in a zero-shot setting where parameters of pre-trained models are fixed. Results show that CodeBERT performs better than previous pre-trained models on NLPL probing.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.139
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1536–1547
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.139
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.139
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhangyin Feng, Daya Guo, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Xiaocheng Feng, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Daxin Jiang, and Ming Zhou. 2020. CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 1536–1547, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages (Feng et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.findings-emnlp.139.pdf
Code
 microsoft/CodeBERT +  additional community code
Data
CodeSearchNetManyTypes4TypeScript