User Centric Evaluation of Code Generation Tools

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Miah, Tanha, Zhu, Hong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Miah, Tanha
Zhu, Hong
author_facet Miah, Tanha
Zhu, Hong
contents With the rapid advance of machine learning (ML) technology, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as an intelligent tool to generate program code from natural language specifications. However, existing evaluations of LLMs have focused on their capabilities in comparison with humans. It is desirable to evaluate their usability when deciding on whether to use a LLM in software production. This paper proposes a user centric method for this purpose. It includes metadata in the test cases of a benchmark to describe their usages, conducts testing in a multi-attempt process that mimics the uses of LLMs, measures LLM generated solutions on a set of quality attributes that reflect usability, and evaluates the performance based on user experiences in the uses of LLMs as a tool. The paper also reports a case study with the method in the evaluation of ChatGPT's usability as a code generation tool for the R programming language. Our experiments demonstrated that ChatGPT is highly useful for generating R program code although it may fail on hard programming tasks. The user experiences are good with overall average number of attempts being 1.61 and the average time of completion being 47.02 seconds. Our experiments also found that the weakest aspect of usability is conciseness, which has a score of 3.80 out of 5.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03130
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle User Centric Evaluation of Code Generation Tools
Miah, Tanha
Zhu, Hong
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
With the rapid advance of machine learning (ML) technology, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as an intelligent tool to generate program code from natural language specifications. However, existing evaluations of LLMs have focused on their capabilities in comparison with humans. It is desirable to evaluate their usability when deciding on whether to use a LLM in software production. This paper proposes a user centric method for this purpose. It includes metadata in the test cases of a benchmark to describe their usages, conducts testing in a multi-attempt process that mimics the uses of LLMs, measures LLM generated solutions on a set of quality attributes that reflect usability, and evaluates the performance based on user experiences in the uses of LLMs as a tool. The paper also reports a case study with the method in the evaluation of ChatGPT's usability as a code generation tool for the R programming language. Our experiments demonstrated that ChatGPT is highly useful for generating R program code although it may fail on hard programming tasks. The user experiences are good with overall average number of attempts being 1.61 and the average time of completion being 47.02 seconds. Our experiments also found that the weakest aspect of usability is conciseness, which has a score of 3.80 out of 5.
title User Centric Evaluation of Code Generation Tools
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03130