Scope-aware Code Completion with Discriminative Modeling

Abstract

Code completion is a traditional popular feature for API access in integrated development environments (IDEs). It not only frees programmers from remembering specific details about an API but also saves keystrokes and corrects typographical errors. Existing methods for code completion usually suggest APIs based on statistics in code bases described by language models. However, they neglect the fact that the user's input is also very useful for ranking, as the underlying patterns can be used to improve the accuracy of predictions of intended APIs. In this paper, we propose a novel method to improve the quality of code completion by incorporating the users' acronym-like input conventions and the APIs' scope context into a discriminative model. The users' input conventions are learned using a logistic regression model by extracting features from collected training data. The weights in the discriminative model are learned using a support vector machine (SVM). To improve the real-time efficiency of code completion, we employ a trie to index and store the scope context information. An efficient top-k algorithm is developed. Experiments show that our proposed method outperforms the baseline methods in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.