Naturally!: How Breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing Can Dramatically Help Developers

Taking advantage of the naturalness hypothesis for code, recent development, and research has focused on applying machine learning (ML) techniques originally developed for natural language processing (NLP) to drive a new wave of tools and applications aimed specifically for software engineering (SE) tasks. This drive to apply ML and deep learning (DL) has been animated by the large-scale availability of software development data (e.g., source code, code comments, code review comments, commit data, and so on) available from open source platforms such as GitHub and Bitbucket.