EMNLP2024
DocCGen: Document-based Controlled Code Generation
Sameer Pimparkhede, Mehant Kammakomati, Srikanth Tamilselvam, Prince Kumar, Ashok Pon Kumar, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
4 citations
Abstract
Recent developments show that Large Language Models (LLMs) produce state-of-theart performance on natural language (NL) to code generation for resource-rich generalpurpose languages like C++, Java, and Python. However, their practical usage for structured domain-specific languages (DSLs) such as YAML, JSON is limited due to domain-specific schema, grammar, and customizations generally unseen by LLMs during pre-training. Efforts have been made to mitigate this challenge via in-context learning through relevant examples or by fine-tuning. However, it suffers from problems, such as limited DSL samples and prompt sensitivity but enterprises maintain good documentation of the DSLs. Therefore, we propose DocCGen, a framework that can leverage such rich knowledge by breaking the NL-to-Code generation task for structured code languages into a two-step process. First, it detects the correct libraries using the library documentation that best matches the NL query. Then, it utilizes schema rules extracted from the documentation of these libraries to constrain the decoding. We evaluate our framework for two complex structured languages, Ansible YAML and Bash command, consisting of two settings: Out-of-domain (OOD) and Indomain (ID). Our extensive experiments show that DocCGen consistently improves differentsized language models across all six evaluation metrics, reducing syntactic and semantic errors in structured code 1 .