Let's Ask AI About Their Programs: Exploring ChatGPT's Answers To Program Comprehension Questions
Recent research has explored the creation of questions from code submitted by students. These Questions about Learners’ Code (QLCs) are created through program analysis, exploring execution paths, and then creating code comprehension questions from these paths and the broader code structure. Responding to the questions requires reading and tracing the code, which is known to support students’ learning. At the same time, computing education researchers have witnessed the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) that have taken the community by storm. Researchers have demonstrated the applicability of these models especially in the introductory programming context, outlining their performance in solving introductory programming problems and their utility in creating new learning resources. In this work, we explore the capability of the state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) in answering QLCs that are generated from code that the LLMs have created. Our results show that although the state-of-the-art LLMs can create programs and trace program execution when prompted, they easily succumb to similar errors that have previously been recorded for novice programmers. These results demonstrate the fallibility of these models and perhaps dampen the expectations fueled by the recent LLM hype. At the same time, we also highlight future research possibilities such as using LLMs to mimic students as their behavior can indeed be similar for some specific tasks.
Slides (icse24slides-letsaskaiabouttheirprograms.pdf) | 772KiB |
Fri 19 AprDisplayed time zone: Lisbon change
11:00 - 12:30 | LLM, NN and other AI technologies 5Software Engineering Education and Training / Software Engineering in Practice / Research Track at Grande Auditório Chair(s): Baishakhi Ray AWS AI Labs | ||
11:00 15mTalk | Enhancing Exploratory Testing by Large Language Model and Knowledge Graph Research Track Yanqi Su Australian National University, Dianshu Liao Australian National University, Zhenchang Xing CSIRO's Data61, Qing Huang School of Computer Information Engineering, Jiangxi Normal University, Mulong Xie CSIRO's Data61, Qinghua Lu Data61, CSIRO, Xiwei (Sherry) Xu Data61, CSIRO | ||
11:15 15mTalk | LLMParser: An Exploratory Study on Using Large Language Models for Log Parsing Research Track Zeyang Ma Concordia University, An Ran Chen University of Alberta, Dong Jae Kim Concordia University, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen Concordia University, Shaowei Wang Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba, Canada | ||
11:30 15mTalk | Enhancing Text-to-SQL Translation for Financial System Design Software Engineering in Practice Yewei Song University of Luxembourg, Saad Ezzini Lancaster University, Xunzhu Tang University of Luxembourg, Cedric Lothritz University of Luxembourg, Jacques Klein University of Luxembourg, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé University of Luxembourg, Andrey Boytsov Banque BGL BNP Paribas, Ulrick Ble Banque BGL BNP Paribas, Anne Goujon Banque BGL BNP Paribas | ||
11:45 15mTalk | Towards Building AI-CPS with NVIDIA Isaac Sim: An Industrial Benchmark and Case Study for Robotics Manipulation Software Engineering in Practice Zhehua Zhou University of Alberta, Jiayang Song University of Alberta, Xuan Xie University of Alberta, Zhan Shu University of Alberta, Lei Ma The University of Tokyo & University of Alberta, Dikai Liu NVIDIA AI Tech Centre, Jianxiong Yin NVIDIA AI Tech Centre, Simon See NVIDIA AI Tech Centre Pre-print | ||
12:00 15mTalk | Let's Ask AI About Their Programs: Exploring ChatGPT's Answers To Program Comprehension Questions Software Engineering Education and Training Pre-print Media Attached File Attached | ||
12:15 15mTalk | Experience Report: Identifying common misconceptions and errors of novice programmers with ChatGPT Software Engineering Education and Training Hua Leong Fwa Singapore Management University Media Attached |