Neural code translation is the task of converting source code from one programming language to another. One of the main challenges is the scarcity of parallel code data, which hinders the ability of translation models to learn accurate cross-language alignments. In this paper, we introduce MIRACLE, a semi-supervised approach that improves code translation through synthesizing high-quality parallel code data and curriculum learning on code data with ascending alignment levels. MIRACLE leverages static analysis and compilation to generate synthetic parallel code datasets with enhanced quality and alignment to address the challenge of data scarcity. We evaluate the proposed method along with strong baselines including instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) for code. Our analysis reveals that LLMs pre-trained on open-source code data, regardless of their size, suffer from the "shallow translation" problem. This issue arises when translated code copies keywords, statements, and even code blocks from the source language, leading to compilation and runtime errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly mitigates this issue, enhancing code translation performance across multiple models in C++, Java, Python, and C. Remarkably, MIRACLE outperforms code LLMs that are ten times larger in size. MIRACLE also achieves up to a 43% improvement in C code translation with fewer than 150 annotated examples.

There has been a recent surge of interest in automating software engineering tasks using deep learning. This article addresses the problem of code generation, in which the goal is to generate target code given source code in a different language or a natural language description. Most state-of-the-art deep learning models for code generation use training strategies primarily designed for natural language. However, understanding and generating code requires a more rigorous comprehension of the code syntax and semantics. With this motivation, we develop an encoder-decoder Transformer model in which both the encoder and decoder are explicitly trained to recognize the syntax and dataflow in the source and target codes, respectively. We not only make the encoder structure aware by leveraging the source code’s syntax tree and dataflow graph, but we also support the decoder in preserving the syntax and dataflow of the target code by introducing two novel auxiliary tasks: Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) path prediction and dataflow prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce a structure-aware Transformer decoder that models both syntax and dataflow to enhance the quality of generated code. The proposed StructCoder model achieves state-of-the-art performance on code translation and text-to-code generation tasks in the CodeXGLUE benchmark and improves over baselines of similar size on the APPS code generation benchmark. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/reddy-lab-code-research/StructCoder/ .

Program translation aims to translate source code from one programming language to another. It is particularly useful in applications such as multiple-platform adaptation and legacy code migration. Traditional rule-based program translation methods usually rely on meticulous manual rule-crafting, which is costly both in terms of time and effort. Recently, neural network based methods have been developed to address this problem. However, the absence of high-quality parallel code data is one of the main bottlenecks which impedes the development of program translation models. In this paper, we introduce CoST, a new multilingual Code Snippet Translation dataset that contains parallel data from 7 commonly used programming languages. The dataset is parallel at the level of code snippets, which provides much more fine-grained alignments between different languages than the existing translation datasets. We also propose a new program translation model that leverages multilingual snippet denoising auto-encoding and Multilingual Snippet Translation (MuST) pre-training. Extensive experiments show that the multilingual snippet training is effective in improving program translation performance, especially for low-resource languages. Moreover, our training method shows good generalizability and consistently improves the translation performance of a number of baseline models. The proposed model outperforms the baselines on both snippet-level and program-level translation, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on CodeXGLUE translation task. The code, data, and appendix for this paper can be found at https://github.com/reddy-lab-code-research/MuST-CoST.

Entity linking is the task of linking mentions of named entities in natural language text, to entities in a curated knowledge-base. This is of significant importance in the biomedical domain, where it could be used to semantically annotate a large volume of clinical records and biomedical literature, to standardized concepts described in an ontology such as Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We observe that with precise type information, entity disambiguation becomes a straightforward task. However, fine-grained type information is usually not available in biomedical domain. Thus, we propose LATTE, a LATent Type Entity Linking model, that improves entity linking by modeling the latent fine-grained type information about mentions and entities. Unlike previous methods that perform entity linking directly between the mentions and the entities, LATTE jointly does entity disambiguation, and latent fine-grained type learning, without direct supervision. We evaluate our model on two biomedical datasets: MedMentions, a large scale public dataset annotated with UMLS concepts, and a de-identified corpus of dictated doctor's notes that has been annotated with ICD concepts. Extensive experimental evaluation shows our model achieves significant performance improvements over several state-of-the-art techniques.

The growth of the Web in recent years has resulted in the development of various online platforms that provide healthcare information services. These platforms contain an enormous amount of information, which could be beneficial for a large number of people. However, navigating through such knowledgebases to answer specific queries of healthcare consumers is a challenging task. A majority of such queries might be non-factoid in nature, and hence, traditional keyword-based retrieval models do not work well for such cases. Furthermore, in many scenarios, it might be desirable to get a short answer that sufficiently answers the query, instead of a long document with only a small amount of useful information. In this paper, we propose a neural network model for ranking documents for question answering in the healthcare domain. The proposed model uses a deep attention mechanism at word, sentence, and document levels, for efficient retrieval for both factoid and non-factoid queries, on documents of varied lengths. Specifically, the word-level cross-attention allows the model to identify words that might be most relevant for a query, and the hierarchical attention at sentence and document levels allows it to do effective retrieval on both long and short documents. We also construct a new large-scale healthcare question-answering dataset, which we use to evaluate our model. Experimental evaluation results against several state-of-the-art baselines show that our model outperforms the existing retrieval techniques.