Code completion of multiple keywords from abbreviated input

摘要

Abbreviation Completion is a novel technique to improve the efficiency of code-writing by supporting code completion of multiple keywords based on non-predefined abbreviated input—a different approach from conventional code completion that finds one keyword at a time based on an exact character match. Abbreviated input consisting of abbreviated keywords and non-alphanumeric characters between each abbreviated keyword (e.g. pb st nm) is expanded into a full expression (e.g. public String name) by a Hidden Markov Model learned from a corpus of existing code and abbreviation examples. The technique does not require the user to memorize abbreviations and provides incremental feedback of the most likely completions.