2019/08/15 by Muhammad Khalifa, Khalifa, Muhammad
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Topic Modeling #Web Data Mining and Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1908.06738
openalex publication_date 2019/08/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With the recent explosion in the size and complexity of source codebases and software projects, the need for efficient source code search engines has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, existing information retrieval-based methods fail to capture the query semantics and perform well only when the query contains syntax-based keywords. Consequently, such methods will perform poorly when given high-level natural language queries. In this paper, we review existing methods for building code search engines. We also outline the open research directions and the various obstacles that stand in the way of having a universal source code search engine.