Title: Program Language Translation Using a Grammar-Driven Tree-to-Tree Model,
Abstract: The task of translating between programming languages differs from the
challenge of translating natural languages in that programming languages are
designed with a far more rigid set of structural and grammatical rules.
Previous work has used a tree-to-tree encoder/decoder model to take advantage
of the inherent tree structure of programs during translation. Neural decoders,
however, by default do not exploit known grammar rules of the target language.
In this paper, we describe a tree decoder that leverages knowledge of a
language's grammar rules to exclusively generate syntactically correct
programs. We find that this grammar-based tree-to-tree model outperforms the
state of the art tree-to-tree model in translating between two programming
languages on a previously used synthetic task.