| EPSRC Reference: |
EP/S000143/1 |
| Title: |
Automatic repair of natural source code |
| Principal Investigator: |
Matragkas, Dr N |
| Other Investigators: |
|
| Researcher Co-Investigators: |
|
| Project Partners: |
|
| Department: |
Computer Science |
| Organisation: |
University of York |
| Scheme: |
New Investigator Award |
| Starts: |
01 December 2018 |
Ends: |
31 October 2020 |
Value (£): |
131,677
|
| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Artificial Intelligence |
Computational Linguistics |
| Software Engineering |
|
|
| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
|
| Related Grants: |
|
| Panel History: |
| Panel Date | Panel Name | Outcome |
|
02 May 2018
|
EPSRC ICT Prioritisation Panel May 2018
|
Announced
|
|
|
Summary on Grant Application Form |
Fixing software defects is a time-consuming and costly activity. One of the main reasons why software debugging is so expensive is that it still remains mainly a manual activity. Fixing a bug is a complex process, which consists of many different steps including finding and understanding the underlying cause of the bug, identifying a set of changes that address the bug correctly, and finally verifying that those changes are correct. Automating this process (or parts of it) can potentially reduce the time, cost and effort it takes to fix bugs, and therefore the quality of the produced software.
Automatic Program repair (APR) is defined as the activity of removing a software defect during software maintenance without human intervention. The most popular approaches to automatic program repair rely on test suites as proxies of the behavioural specification of the system under repair. Although these approaches have demonstrated promising results, such as the synthesis of a fix for the famous Hearbleed bug, they face serious challenges. The main one is the correctness of the generated patches. Test suites are an imperfect metric of program correctness. Therefore techniques, which rely on test suites to evaluate the correctness of the generated patches, tend to overfit the test suite. Additionally, test-driven APR techniques can have scalability limitations in terms of execution time. The space of possible patches is vast and correct patches occur sparsely. In test-driven APR approaches the search time is mainly dominated by the validation of the patches, i.e. by the execution of the test suite. Existing approaches try to address this issue by employing various strategies such as parallel execution of test suites or the use of just a subset of the test suite (sample of positive test cases and all the negative ones). Although, such strategies improve the execution time, scalability of APR approaches remains a challenge.
The motivation of the project is to address overfitting and scalability limitations of APR techniques. The main hypothesis is the following: Statistical properties of source code can improve the state-of-the-art generate-and-validate techniques for APR in terms of patch correctness and execution time.
Statistical properties of source code (i.e. naturalness of source code) can help address the challenges of APR techniques in the following ways:
1) Heuristics based on the statistical properties of source code can be used to rank the results of fault localisation algorithms, and therefore augment their ability to correctly identify faulty lines of code.
2) Execution time of test-driven APR techniques can be reduced by discarding unnatural patches without executing the test suite.
3) Correctness of candidate patches can be improved by using the naturalness of code as part of the fitness function.
To measure the naturalness of source code, this project will mine existing software repositories such as GitHub and it will develop language models, similar to those used in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain. These models will be used to assess the naturalness of proposed patches.
|
|
Key Findings |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
|
Potential use in non-academic contexts |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
|
Impacts |
|
| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
|
| Date Materialised |
|
|
|
|
Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
|
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
|
| Project URL: |
|
| Further Information: |
|
| Organisation Website: |
http://www.york.ac.uk |