Generative AI for Software Metadata: Overview of the Information Retrieval in Software Engineering Track at FIRE 2023

The Information Retrieval in Software Engineering (IRSE) track aims to develop solutions for automated evaluation of code comments in a machine learning framework based on human and large language model generated labels. In this track, there is a binary classification task to classify comments as useful and not useful. The dataset consists of 9048 code comments and surrounding code snippet pairs extracted from open source github C based projects and an additional dataset generated individually by teams using large language models. Overall 56 experiments have been submitted by 17 teams from various universities and software companies. The submissions have been evaluated quantitatively using the F1-Score and qualitatively based on the type of features developed, the supervised learning model used and their corresponding hyper-parameters. The labels generated from large language models increase the bias in the prediction model but lead to less over-fitted results.

Recovering from Privacy-Preserving Masking with Large Language Models

Model adaptation is crucial to handle the discrepancy between proxy training data and actual users data received. To effectively perform adaptation, textual data of users is typically stored on servers or their local devices, where downstream natural language processing (NLP) models can be directly trained using such in-domain data. However, this might raise privacy and security concerns due to the extra risks of exposing user information to adversaries. Replacing identifying information in textual data with a generic marker has been recently explored. In this work, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to suggest substitutes of masked tokens and have their effectiveness evaluated on downstream language modeling tasks. Specifically, we propose multiple pre-trained and fine-tuned LLM-based approaches and perform empirical studies on various datasets for the comparison of these methods. Experimental results show that models trained on the obfuscation corpora are able to achieve comparable performance with the ones trained on the original data without privacy-preserving token masking.

Language Agnostic Data-Driven Inverse Text Normalization

With the emergence of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, converting the spoken form text (from ASR) to the written form is in urgent need. This inverse text normalization (ITN) problem attracts the attention of researchers from various fields. Recently, several works show that data-driven ITN methods can output high-quality written form text. Due to the scarcity of labeled spoken-written datasets, the studies on non-English data-driven ITN are quite limited. In this work, we propose a language-agnostic data-driven ITN framework to fill this gap. Specifically, we leverage the data augmentation in conjunction with neural machine translated data for low resource languages. Moreover, we design an evaluation method for language agnostic ITN model when only English data is available. Our empirical evaluation shows this language agnostic modeling approach is effective for low resource languages while preserving the performance for high resource languages.

Improving Data Driven Inverse Text Normalization using Data Augmentation

Inverse text normalization (ITN) is used to convert the spoken form output of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to a written form. Traditional handcrafted ITN rules can be complex to transcribe and maintain. Meanwhile neural modeling approaches require quality large-scale spoken-written pair examples in the same or similar domain as the ASR system (in-domain data), to train. Both these approaches require costly and complex annotations. In this paper, we present a data augmentation technique that effectively generates rich spoken-written numeric pairs from out-of-domain textual data with minimal human annotation. We empirically demonstrate that ITN model trained using our data augmentation technique consistently outperform ITN model trained using only in-domain data across all numeric surfaces like cardinal, currency, and fraction, by an overall accuracy of 14.44%.

Database Workload Characterization with Query Plan Encoders

Smart databases are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to achieve {\em instance optimality}, and in the future, databases will come with prepackaged AI models within their core components. The reason is that every database runs on different workloads, demands specific resources, and settings to achieve optimal performance. It prompts the necessity to understand workloads running in the system along with their features comprehensively, which we dub as workload characterization. To address this workload characterization problem, we propose our query plan encoders that learn essential features and their correlations from query plans. Our pretrained encoders capture the {\em structural} and the {\em computational performance} of queries independently. We show that our pretrained encoders are adaptable to workloads that expedite the transfer learning process. We performed independent assessments of structural encoder and performance encoders with multiple downstream tasks. For the overall evaluation of our query plan encoders, we architect two downstream tasks (i) query latency prediction and (ii) query classification. These tasks show the importance of feature-based workload characterization. We also performed extensive experiments on individual encoders to verify the effectiveness of representation learning and domain adaptability.