Repository-level Code Search with Neural Retrieval Methods

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Gandhi, Siddharth, Gao, Luyu, Callan, Jamie
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Gandhi, Siddharth
Gao, Luyu
Callan, Jamie
author_facet Gandhi, Siddharth
Gao, Luyu
Callan, Jamie
contents This paper presents a multi-stage reranking system for repository-level code search, which leverages the vastly available commit histories of large open-source repositories to aid in bug fixing. We define the task of repository-level code search as retrieving the set of files from the current state of a code repository that are most relevant to addressing a user's question or bug. The proposed approach combines BM25-based retrieval over commit messages with neural reranking using CodeBERT to identify the most pertinent files. By learning patterns from diverse repositories and their commit histories, the system can surface relevant files for the task at hand. The system leverages both commit messages and source code for relevance matching, and is evaluated in both normal and oracle settings. Experiments on a new dataset created from 7 popular open-source repositories demonstrate substantial improvements of up to 80% in MAP, MRR and P@1 over the BM25 baseline, across a diverse set of queries, demonstrating the effectiveness this approach. We hope this work aids LLM agents as a tool for better code search and understanding. Our code and results obtained are publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07067
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Repository-level Code Search with Neural Retrieval Methods
Gandhi, Siddharth
Gao, Luyu
Callan, Jamie
Information Retrieval
This paper presents a multi-stage reranking system for repository-level code search, which leverages the vastly available commit histories of large open-source repositories to aid in bug fixing. We define the task of repository-level code search as retrieving the set of files from the current state of a code repository that are most relevant to addressing a user's question or bug. The proposed approach combines BM25-based retrieval over commit messages with neural reranking using CodeBERT to identify the most pertinent files. By learning patterns from diverse repositories and their commit histories, the system can surface relevant files for the task at hand. The system leverages both commit messages and source code for relevance matching, and is evaluated in both normal and oracle settings. Experiments on a new dataset created from 7 popular open-source repositories demonstrate substantial improvements of up to 80% in MAP, MRR and P@1 over the BM25 baseline, across a diverse set of queries, demonstrating the effectiveness this approach. We hope this work aids LLM agents as a tool for better code search and understanding. Our code and results obtained are publicly available.
title Repository-level Code Search with Neural Retrieval Methods
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07067