Novice Type Error Diagnosis with Natural Language Models
Strong static type systems help programmers eliminate many errors without much burden of supplying type annotations. However, this flexibility makes it highly non-trivial to diagnose ill-typed programs, especially for novice programmers. Compared to classic constraint solving and optimization-based approaches, the data-driven approach has shown great promise in identifying the root causes of type errors with higher accuracy. Instead of relying on hand-engineered features, this work explores natural language models for type error localization, which can be trained in an end-to-end fashion without requiring any features. We demonstrate that, for novice type error diagnosis, the language model-based approach significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art data-driven approach. Specifically, our model could predict type errors correctly 62% of the time, outperforming the state-of-the-art Nate’s data-driven model by 11%, in a more rigorous metric of accuracy measurement. Furthermore, we also apply structural probes to explain the performance difference of different language models.
Mon 5 DecDisplayed time zone: Auckland, Wellington change
15:30 - 17:30 | |||
15:30 30mTalk | Characterizing functions mappable over GADTs APLAS | ||
16:00 30mTalk | Applicative Intersection Types APLAS Xu Xue University of Hong Kong, Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira University of Hong Kong, Ningning Xie University of Toronto | ||
16:30 30mTalk | A Calculus with Recursive Types, Record Concatenation and Subtyping APLAS Yaoda Zhou University of Hong Kong, Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira University of Hong Kong, Andong Fan Hong Kong University of Science and Technology | ||
17:00 30mTalk | Novice Type Error Diagnosis with Natural Language Models APLAS Chuqin Geng McGill University, Haolin Ye McGill University, Yixuan Li McGill University, Tianyu Han McGill University, Brigitte Pientka McGill University, Xujie Si McGill University, Canada |