Toward semantic search via SMT solver

  • Authors:

  • Kathryn T. Stolee;Sebastian Elbaum

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Nebraska -- Lincoln, Lincoln, NE;University of Nebraska -- Lincoln, Lincoln, NE

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Searching for code is a common task among programmers, with the ultimate goal of reuse. While the process of searching for code -- issuing a query and selecting a relevant match -- is straightforward, several costs must be balanced, including the costs of specifying the query, examining the results to find desired code, and not finding a relevant result. For syntactic searches the query cost is quite low, but the results are often irrelevant, so the examination cost is high and matches may be missed. Semantic searches may return more relevant results, but current techniques that involve writing complex specifications or executing code against test cases are costly to the developer. We propose an approach for semantic search in which developers specify lightweight specifications and an SMT solver identifies matching programs from a repository. A program repository is automatically encoded offline so the search is efficient. Programs are encoded at various abstraction levels to enable partial matches when no, or few, exact matches exist. We instantiate this approach on a subset of the Yahoo! Pipes mashup language. Preliminary results show promise for the feasibility of the approach.