Automated code generation has been extensively studied in recent literature. In this work, we first survey 66 participants to motivate a more pragmatic code generation scenario, i.e., library-oriented code generation, where the generated code should implement the functionally of the natural language query with the given library. We then revisit existing learning- based code generation techniques and find they have limited effectiveness in such a library-oriented code generation scenario. To address this limitation, we propose a novel library-oriented code generation technique, CodeGen4Libs, which incorporates two stages: import generation and code generation. The import generation stage generates import statements for the natural language query with the given third-party libraries, while the code generation stage generates concrete code based on the generated imports and the query. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on a dataset of 403,780 data items. Our results demonstrate that CodeGen4Libs outperforms baseline models in both import generation and code generation stages, achieving improvements of up to 97.4% on EM (Exact Match), 54.5% on BLEU, and 53.5% on Hit@All. Overall, our proposed CodeGen4Libs approach shows promising results in generating high-quality code with specific third-party libraries, which can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of software development.

Mingwei Liu

Fudan University

China

Tianyong Yang

Fudan University

China

Yiling Lou

Fudan University

China

Xueying Du

Fudan University

China

Ying Wang

Northeastern University

China

Xin Peng

Fudan University

China