How to Understand Whole Software Repository?

Recently, Large Language Model (LLM) based agents have advanced the significant development of Automatic Software Engineering (ASE). Although verified effectiveness, the designs of the existing methods mainly focus on the local information of codes, e.g., issues, classes, and functions, leading to limitations in capturing the global context and interdependencies within the software system. From the practical experiences of the human SE developers, we argue that an excellent understanding of the whole repository will be the critical path to ASE. However, understanding the whole repository raises various challenges, e.g., the extremely long code input, the noisy code information, the complex dependency relationships, etc. To this end, we develop a novel ASE method named RepoUnderstander by guiding agents to comprehensively understand the whole repositories. Specifically, we first condense the critical information of the whole repository into the repository knowledge graph in a top-to-down mode to decrease the complexity of repository. Subsequently, we empower the agents the ability of understanding whole repository by proposing a Monte Carlo tree search based repository exploration strategy. In addition, to better utilize the repository-level knowledge, we guide the agents to summarize, analyze, and plan. Then, they can manipulate the tools to dynamically acquire information and generate the patches to solve the real-world GitHub issues. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed RepoUnderstander. It achieved 18.5\% relative improvement on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark compared to SWE-agent.

CATS: A Pragmatic Chinese Answer-to-Sequence Dataset with Large Scale and High Quality

There are three problems existing in the popular data-to-text datasets. First, the large-scale datasets either contain noise or lack real application scenarios. Second, the datasets close to real applications are relatively small in size. Last, current datasets bias in the English language while leaving other languages underexplored. To alleviate these limitations, in this paper, we present CATS, a pragmatic Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset with large scale and high quality. The dataset aims to generate textual descriptions for the answer in the practical TableQA system. Further, to bridge the structural gap between the input SQL and table and establish better semantic alignments, we propose a Unified Graph Transformation approach to establish a joint encoding space for the two hybrid knowledge resources and convert this task to a graph-to-text problem. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Further analysis on CATS attests to both the high quality and challenges of the dataset.

Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs

Text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, Codex and ChatGPT have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present Bird, a big benchmark for large-scale database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. ChatGPT, only achieves 40.08% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. Besides, we also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries. We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/.

A Survey on Text-to-SQL Parsing: Concepts, Methods, and Future Directions

Text-to-SQL parsing is an essential and challenging task. The goal of text-to-SQL parsing is to convert a natural language (NL) question to its corresponding structured query language (SQL) based on the evidences provided by relational databases. Early text-to-SQL parsing systems from the database community achieved a noticeable progress with the cost of heavy human engineering and user interactions with the systems. In recent years, deep neural networks have significantly advanced this task by neural generation models, which automatically learn a mapping function from an input NL question to an output SQL query. Subsequently, the large pre-trained language models have taken the state-of-the-art of the text-to-SQL parsing task to a new level. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review on deep learning approaches for text-to-SQL parsing. First, we introduce the text-to-SQL parsing corpora which can be categorized as single-turn and multi-turn. Second, we provide a systematical overview of pre-trained language models and existing methods for text-to-SQL parsing. Third, we present readers with the challenges faced by text-to-SQL parsing and explore some potential future directions in this field.

Extracting Variable-Depth Logical Document Hierarchy from Long Documents: Method, Evaluation, and Application

In this paper, we study the problem of extracting variable-depth "logical document hierarchy" from long documents, namely organizing the recognized "physical document objects" into hierarchical structures. The discovery of logical document hierarchy is the vital step to support many downstream applications. However, long documents, containing hundreds or even thousands of pages and variable-depth hierarchy, challenge the existing methods. To address these challenges, we develop a framework, namely Hierarchy Extraction from Long Document (HELD), where we "sequentially" insert each physical object at the proper on of the current tree. Determining whether each possible position is proper or not can be formulated as a binary classification problem. To further improve its effectiveness and efficiency, we study the design variants in HELD, including traversal orders of the insertion positions, heading extraction explicitly or implicitly, tolerance to insertion errors in predecessor steps, and so on. The empirical experiments based on thousands of long documents from Chinese, English financial market and English scientific publication show that the HELD model with the "root-to-leaf" traversal order and explicit heading extraction is the best choice to achieve the tradeoff between effectiveness and efficiency with the accuracy of 0.9726, 0.7291 and 0.9578 in Chinese financial, English financial and arXiv datasets, respectively. Finally, we show that logical document hierarchy can be employed to significantly improve the performance of the downstream passage retrieval task. In summary, we conduct a systematic study on this task in terms of methods, evaluations, and applications.

Hierarchical Neural Network for Extracting Knowledgeable Snippets and Documents

In this study, we focus on extracting knowledgeable snippets and annotating knowledgeable documents from Web corpus, consisting of the documents from social media and We-media. Informally, knowledgeable snippets refer to the text describing concepts, properties of entities, or relations among entities, while knowledgeable documents are the ones with enough knowledgeable snippets. These knowledgeable snippets and documents could be helpful in multiple applications, such as knowledge base construction and knowledge-oriented service. Previous studies extracted the knowledgeable snippets using the pattern-based method. Here, we propose the semantic-based method for this task. Specifically, a CNN based model is developed to extract knowledgeable snippets and annotate knowledgeable documents simultaneously. Additionally, a "low-level sharing, high-level splitting" structure of CNN is designed to handle the documents from different content domains. Compared with building multiple domain-specific CNNs, this joint model not only critically saves the training time, but also improves the prediction accuracy visibly. The superiority of the proposed method is demonstrated in a real dataset from Wechat public platform.

Tree-Structured Neural Machine for Linguistics-Aware Sentence Generation

Different from other sequential data, sentences in natural language are structured by linguistic grammars. Previous generative conversational models with chain-structured decoder ignore this structure in human language and might generate plausible responses with less satisfactory relevance and fluency. In this study, we aim to incorporate the results from linguistic analysis into the process of sentence generation for high-quality conversation generation. Specifically, we use a dependency parser to transform each response sentence into a dependency tree and construct a training corpus of sentence-tree pairs. A tree-structured decoder is developed to learn the mapping from a sentence to its tree, where different types of hidden states are used to depict the local dependencies from an internal tree node to its children. For training acceleration, we propose a tree canonicalization method, which transforms trees into equivalent ternary trees. Then, with a proposed tree-structured search method, the model is able to generate the most probable responses in the form of dependency trees, which are finally flattened into sequences as the system output. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed X2Tree framework outperforms baseline methods over 11.15% increase of acceptance ratio.