What is the cube root of 27? Question Answering over CodeOntology

Atzeni, Mattia;Atzori, Maurizio

2018-01-01

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Abstract

We present an unsupervised approach to process natural language questions that cannot be answered by factual question answering nor advanced data querying, requiring instead ad-hoc code generation and execution. To address this challenging task, our system,, performs language-to-code translation by interpreting the natural language question and generating a SPARQL query that is run against CodeOntology, a large RDF repository containing millions of triples representing Java code constructs. The query retrieves a number of Java source code snippets and methods, ranked by on both syntactic and semantic features, to find the best candidate, that is then executed to get the correct answer. The evaluation of the system is based on a dataset extracted from StackOverflow and experimental results show that our approach is comparable with other state-of-the-art proprietary systems, such as the closed-source WolframAlpha computational knowledge engine.