Enhancing Code Intelligence Tasks with ChatGPT

Abstract

Pre-trained code models have emerged as crucial tools in various code intelligence tasks. However, their effectiveness depends on the quality of the pre-training dataset, particularly the human reference comments, which serve as a bridge between the programming language and natural language. One significant challenge is that such comments can become inconsistent with the corresponding code as the software evolves. This discrepancy can lead to suboptimal training of the models, decreasing their performances. LLMs have demonstrated superior capabilities in generating high-quality code comments. In light of that, we try to tackle the quality issue of the dataset by harnessing the power of LLMs. Specifically, we raise the question: Can we rebuild the pre-training dataset by substituting the original comments with LLM-generated ones for more effective pre-trained code models? To answer the question, we first conduct a comprehensive evaluation to compare ChatGPT-generated comments with human reference comments. As existing reference-based metrics treat the reference comments as gold standards, we introduce two auxiliary tasks as novel reference-free metrics to assess the quality of comments, i.e., code-comment inconsistency detection and code search. Experimental results show that ChatGPT-generated comments demonstrate superior semantic consistency with the code compared to human references, indicating the potential of utilizing ChatGPT to enhance the quality of the pre-training dataset. We rebuilt the widely used dataset, CodeSearchNet, with ChatGPT-generated comments. Subsequent experiments involve re-pre-training the CodeT5 with our refined dataset.Evaluation results on four generation tasks and one understanding code intelligence tasks show that the model pre-trained by ChatGPT-enhanced data outperforms its counterpart on code summarization, code generation, and code translation tasks.