TBCNN: A Tree-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Programming Language Processing

Deep neural networks have made significant breakthroughs in many fields of artificial intelligence. However, it has not been applied in the field of programming language processing. In this paper, we propose the tree-based convolutional neural network (TBCNN) to model programming languages, which contain rich and explicit tree structural information. In our model, program vector representations are learned by the "coding" pretraining criterion based on abstract syntax trees (ASTs); the convolutional layer explicitly captures neighboring features on the tree; with the "binary continuous tree" and "3-way pooling," our model can deal with ASTs of different shapes and sizes.We evaluate the program vector representations empirically, showing that the coding criterion successfully captures underlying features of AST nodes, and that program vector representations significantly speed up supervised learning. We also compare TBCNN to baseline methods; our model achieves better accuracy in the task of program classification. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first to analyze programs with deep neural networks; we extend the scope of deep learning to the field of programming language processing. The experimental results validate its feasibility; they also show a promising future of this new research area.