Thailand

We take the first step to address the task of automatically generating shellcodes, i.e., small pieces of code used as a payload in the exploitation of a software vulnerability, starting from natural language comments. 
We assemble and release a novel dataset (Shellcode_IA32), consisting of challenging but common assembly instructions with their natural language descriptions. We experiment with standard methods in neural machine translation (NMT) to establish baseline performance levels on this task.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Shellcode_IA32: A Dataset for Automatic Shellcode Generation

software security

assembly

shellcodes

neural machine translation

dataset

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

workshop paper

Models pre-trained on large-scale regular text corpora often do not work well for user-generated data where the language styles differ significantly from the mainstream text. Here we present Context-Aware Rule Injection (CARI), an innovative method for formality style transfer (FST) by injecting multiple rules into an end-to-end BERT-based encoder and decoder model. CARI is able to learn to select optimal rules based on context. The intrinsic evaluation showed that CARI achieved the new highest performance on the FST benchmark dataset. Our extrinsic evaluation showed that CARI can greatly improve the regular pre-trained models' performance on several tweet sentiment analysis tasks. Our contributions are as follows: 1.We propose a new method, CARI, to integrate rules for pre-trained language models. CARI is context-aware and can trained end-to-end with the downstream NLP applications. 2.We have achieved new state-of-the-art results for FST on the benchmark GYAFC dataset. 3.We are the first to evaluate FST methods with extrinsic evaluation and specifically on sentiment classification tasks. We show that CARI outperformed existing rule-based FST approaches for sentiment classification.

Improving Formality Style Transfer with Context-Aware Rule Injection

Approaches to computational argumentation tasks such as stance detection and aspect detection have largely focused on the text of independent claims, losing out on potentially valuable context provided by the rest of the collection. We introduce a general approach to these tasks motivated by syntopical reading, a reading process that emphasizes comparing and contrasting viewpoints in order to improve topic understanding. To capture collection-level context, we introduce the syntopical graph, a data structure for linking claims within a collection. A syntopical graph is a typed multi-graph where nodes represent claims and edges represent different possible pairwise relationships, such as entailment, paraphrase, or support. Experiments applying syntopical graphs to the problems of detecting stance and aspects demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in each domain, significantly outperforming approaches that do not utilize collection-level information.

Syntopical Graphs for Computational Argumentation Tasks

The prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic in day-to-day life has yielded large amounts of stance detection data on social media sites, as users turn to social media to share their views regarding various issues related to the pandemic, e.g. stay at home mandates and wearing face masks when out in public. We set out to make use of this data by collecting the stance expressed by Twitter users, with respect to topics revolving around the pandemic. We annotate a new stance detection dataset, called COVID-19-Stance. Using this newly annotated dataset, we train several established stance detection models to ascertain a baseline performance for this specific task. To further improve the performance, we employ self-training and domain adaptation approaches to take advantage of large amounts of unlabeled data and existing stance detection datasets. The dataset, code, and other resources are available on GitHub.

Stance Detection in COVID-19 Tweets

BERT has been shown to be extremely effective on a wide variety of natural language processing tasks, including sentiment analysis and emotion detection. However, the proposed pretraining objectives of BERT do not induce any sentiment or emotion-specific biases into the model. In this paper, we present Emotion Masked Language Modelling, a variation of Masked Language Modelling aimed at improving the BERT language representation model for emotion detection and sentiment analysis tasks. Using the same pre-training corpora as the original model, Wikipedia and BookCorpus, our BERT variation manages to improve the downstream performance on 4 tasks from emotion detection and sentiment analysis by an average of 1.2% F-1. Moreover, our approach shows an increased performance in our task-specific robustness tests.

eMLM: A New Pre-training Objective for Emotion Related Tasks

Identifier names convey useful information aboutthe intended semantics of code. Name-based program analyses use this information, e.g., to detect bugs, to predict types,and to improve the readability of code. At the core of name-based analyses are semantic representations of identifiers, e.g., in the form of learned embeddings. The high-level goal ofsuch a representation is to encode whether two identifiers, e.g., len and size, are semantically similar. Unfortunately, it is currently unclear to what extent semantic representations matchthe semantic relatedness and similarity perceived by developers. This paper presents IdBench, the first benchmark for evaluating semantic representations against a ground truth created fromthousands of ratings by 500 software developers. We use IdBench to study state-of-the-art embedding techniques proposed for natural language, an embedding technique specifically designedfor source code, and lexical string distance functions. Our results show that the effectiveness of semantic representations varies significantly and that the best available embeddings successfully represent semantic relatedness. On the downside, no existing technique provides a satisfactory representation ofsemantic similarities, among other reasons because identifiers with opposing meanings are incorrectly considered to be similar,which may lead to fatal mistakes, e.g., in a refactoring tool.S tudying the strengths and weaknesses of the different techniques shows that they complement each other. As a first step toward exploiting this complementarity, we present an ensemble model that combines existing techniques and that clearly outperforms the best available semantic representation.

IdBench: Evaluating Semantic Representations of Identifier Names in Source Code

Question answering on knowledge bases (KBQA) provides a user-friendly interface to the massive structured knowledge in KBs. It presents an array of intertwined challenges including non-i.i.d. generalization, large search space, and schema linking. Existing studies have tackled some of these challenges, but a unified solution that can address all the challenges is still lacking, which limits the applicability of KBQA on large-scale KBs. In this work, we propose a novel model, ArcaneQA, that aims to tackle all the aforementioned challenges and achieve strong (non-i.i.d.) generalization on large-scale KBs. Our model is based on two mutually boosting components: dynamic program induction, which dynamically prunes the search space, and dynamic contextualized encoding, which guides the search process on the large-scale KB via implicit schema linking. Experiment results on multiple popular KBQA datasets demonstrate the highly competitive performance of ArcaneQA in both effectiveness and efficiency, especially on non-i.i.d. generalization and complex questions involving multiple relations and functions.

ArcaneQA: Strongly Generalizable Question Answering on Large-Scale Knowledge Bases

Most available semantic parsing datasets, comprising of pairs of natural utterances and logical forms, were collected solely for the purpose of training and evaluation of natural language understanding systems. As a result, they do not contain any of the richness and variety of natural-occurring utterances, where humans ask about data they need or are curious about. In this work, we release SEDE, a dataset with 12,023 pairs of utterances and SQL queries collected from real usage on the Stack Exchange website. We show that these pairs contain a variety of real-world challenges which were rarely reflected so far in any other semantic parsing dataset, propose an evaluation metric based on comparison of partial query clauses that is more suitable for real-world queries, and conduct experiments with strong baselines, showing a large gap between the performance on SEDE compared to other common datasets.

Text-to-SQL in the Wild: A Naturally-Occurring Dataset Based on Stack Exchange Data

Automated source code summarization is a popular software engineering research topic wherein machine translation models are employed to “translate” code snippets into relevant natural language descriptions. Most evaluations of such models are conducted using automatic reference-based metrics. However, given the relatively large semantic gap between programming languages and natural language, we argue that this line of research would benefit from a qualitative investigation into the various error modes of current state-of-the-art models. Therefore, in this work, we perform both a quantitative and qualitative comparison of three recently proposed source code summarization models. In our quantitative evaluation, we compare the models based on the smoothed BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L machine translation metrics, and in our qualitative evaluation, we perform a manual open-coding of the most common errors committed by the models when compared to ground truth captions. Our investigation reveals new insights into the relationship between metric-based performance and model prediction errors grounded in an error taxonomy that can be used to drive future research efforts.

Code to Comment Translation: A Comparative Study on Model Effectiveness & Errors

We present Text2App -- a framework that allows users to create functional Android applications from natural language specifications. The conventional method of source code generation tries to generate source code directly, which is impractical for creating complex software. We overcome this limitation by transforming natural language into an abstract intermediate formal language representing an application with a substantially smaller number of tokens. The intermediate formal representation is then compiled into target source codes. This abstraction of programming details allows seq2seq networks to learn complex application structures with less overhead. In order to train sequence models, we introduce a data synthesis method grounded in a human survey. We demonstrate that Text2App generalizes well to unseen combination of app components and it is capable of handling noisy natural language instructions. We explore the possibility of creating applications from highly abstract instructions by coupling our system with GPT-3 -- a large pretrained language model. The source code, a ready-to-run demo notebook, and a demo video are publicly available at http://text2app.github.io

Text2App: A Framework for Creating Android Apps from Text Descriptions

Translation between natural language and source code can help software development by enabling developers to comprehend, ideate, search, and write computer programs in natural language. Despite growing interest from the industry and the research community, this task is often difficult due to the lack of large standard datasets suitable for training deep neural models, standard noise removal methods, and evaluation benchmarks. This leaves researchers to collect new small-scale datasets, resulting in inconsistencies across published works. In this study, we present CoDesc -- a large parallel dataset composed of 4.2 million Java methods and natural language descriptions. With extensive analysis, we identify and remove prevailing noise patterns from the dataset. We demonstrate the proficiency of CoDesc in two complementary tasks for code-description pairs: code summarization and code search. We show that the dataset helps improve code search by up to 22\% and achieves the new state-of-the-art in code summarization. Furthermore, we show CoDesc's effectiveness in pre-training--fine-tuning setup, opening possibilities in building pretrained language models for Java. To facilitate future research, we release the dataset, a data processing tool, and a benchmark at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CoDesc

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Shellcode_IA32: A Dataset for Automatic Shellcode Generation

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