CLSEBERT: Contrastive Learning for Syntax Enhanced Code Pre-Trained Model

Pre-trained models for programming languages have proven their significant values in various code-related tasks, such as code search, code clone detection, and code translation. Currently, most pre-trained models treat a code snippet as a sequence of tokens or only focus on the data flow between code identifiers. However, rich code syntax and hierarchy are ignored which can provide important structure information and semantic rules of codes to help enhance code representations. In addition, although the BERT-based code pre-trained models achieve high performance on many downstream tasks, the native derived sequence representations of BERT are proven to be of low-quality, it performs poorly on code matching and similarity tasks. To address these problems, we propose CLSEBERT, a Constrastive Learning Framework for Syntax Enhanced Code Pre-Trained Model, to deal with various code intelligence tasks. In the pre-training stage, we consider the code syntax and hierarchy contained in the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and leverage the constrastive learning to learn noise-invariant code representations. Besides the masked language modeling (MLM), we also introduce two novel pre-training objectives. One is to predict the edges between nodes in the abstract syntax tree, and the other is to predict the types of code tokens. Through extensive experiments on four code intelligence tasks, we successfully show the effectiveness of our proposed model.