Question Generation from Code Snippets and Programming Error Messages

For some inexperienced developers, extracting key information from code snippets and programming error messages and turning it into a highly readable question can help them better understand, locate and search for the cause of errors. This paper proposes a copy mechanism guided transformer with pre-trained programming and natural languages representations (CMPPN) to automatically generate questions with high human readability from code snippets and programming error messages. Our CMPPN is pre-trained on a large scale code corpus with code summarization task based on transformer, and incorporated with copying mechanism in the fine-tuning phase. To evaluate our proposed model, we create a new dataset based on Stack Overflow posts, which contains code snippets, programming error messages and corresponding question headlines in 3 programming languages (Java, C# and Python). Extensive experimental results on this dataset verify the effectiveness of our CMPPN compared to baseline methods. Both dataset and model are available on https://github.com/YuiTH/CEMS-SO.