Corrigendum and Supplement to "Improve Language Modelling for Code Completion through Learning General Token Repetition of Source Code (with Optimized Memory)"

Abstract

This paper is written because I receive several inquiry emails saying it is hard to achieve good results when applying token repetition learning techniques. If REP (proposed by me) or Pointer-Mixture (proposed by Jian Li) is directly applied to source code to decide all token repetitions, the model performance will decrease sharply. As we use pre-order traversal to traverse the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) to generate token sequence, tokens corresponding to AST grammar are ignored when learning token repetition. For non-grammar tokens, there are many kinds: strings, chars, numbers and identifiers. For each kind of tokens, we try to learn its repetition pattern and find that only identifiers have the property of token repetition. For identifiers, there are also many kinds such as variables, package names, method names, simple types, qualified types or qualified names. Actually, some kinds of identifiers such as package names, method names, qualified names or qualified types are unlikely to be repeated. Thus, we ignore these kinds of identifiers that are unlikely to be repeated when learning token repetition. This step is crucial and this important implementation trick is not clearly presented in the paper because we think it is trivial and too many details may bother readers. We offer the GitHub address of our model in our conference paper and readers can check the description and implementation in that repository. Thus, in this paper, we supplement the important implementation optimization details for the already published papers.