Summarize and Generate to Back-translate: Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages
Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Saikat Chakraborty, Baishakhi Ray, Kai-Wei Chang
Abstract
Back-translation is widely known for its effectiveness in neural machine translation when there is little to no parallel data. In this approach, a source-to-target model is coupled with a target-to-source model trained in parallel. The target-to-source model generates noisy sources, while the source-to-target model is trained to reconstruct the targets and vice versa. Recent developments of multilingual pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models for programming languages have been very effective for a broad spectrum of downstream software engineering tasks. Hence, training them to build programming language translation systems via back-translation is compelling. However, these models cannot be further trained via back-translation since they learn to output sequences in the same language as the inputs during pre-training. As an alternative, we propose performing back-translation via code summarization and generation. In code summarization, a model learns to generate natural language (NL) summaries given code snippets. In code generation, the model learns to do the opposite. Therefore, target-to-source generation in back-translation can be viewed as a target-to-NL-to-source generation. We show that our proposed approach performs competitively with state-of-the-art methods. We have made the code publicly available.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.eacl-main.112
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Dubrovnik, Croatia
- Editors:
- Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1528–1542
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.112
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.112
- Cite (ACL):
- Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Saikat Chakraborty, Baishakhi Ray, and Kai-Wei Chang. 2023. Summarize and Generate to Back-translate: Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1528–1542, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Summarize and Generate to Back-translate: Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages (Ahmad et al., EACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/insights-reingestion/2023.eacl-main.112.pdf