@inproceedings{zhong-etal-2020-semantic-scaffolds,
    title = "Semantic Scaffolds for Pseudocode-to-Code Generation",
    author = "Zhong, Ruiqi  and
      Stern, Mitchell  and
      Klein, Dan",
    editor = "Jurafsky, Dan  and
      Chai, Joyce  and
      Schluter, Natalie  and
      Tetreault, Joel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest_wac_2008/2020.acl-main.208/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.208",
    pages = "2283--2295",
    abstract = "We propose a method for program generation based on semantic scaffolds, lightweight structures representing the high-level semantic and syntactic composition of a program. By first searching over plausible scaffolds then using these as constraints for a beam search over programs, we achieve better coverage of the search space when compared with existing techniques. We apply our hierarchical search method to the SPoC dataset for pseudocode-to-code generation, in which we are given line-level natural language pseudocode annotations and aim to produce a program satisfying execution-based test cases. By using semantic scaffolds during inference, we achieve a 10{\%} absolute improvement in top-100 accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art. Additionally, we require only 11 candidates to reach the top-3000 performance of the previous best approach when tested against unseen problems, demonstrating a substantial improvement in efficiency."
}