---
title: "A parallel corpus of Python functions and documentation strings"
description: "Research on translating between source code and natural language has been limited by training data… 21 references, cited by 39 papers here."
authors: ["Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone", "Rico Sennrich"]
year: 2017
venue: "arXiv:1707.02275"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02275"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.1707.02275"
arxiv: "1707.02275"
licence: "arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute"
licence_url: "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/barone-2017-parallel-corpus-python-functions-documentation/"
---
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# A parallel corpus of Python functions and documentation strings for automated code documentation and code generation

**Authors:** [Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/antonio-valerio-miceli-barone/) and [Rico Sennrich](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/rico-sennrich/) · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** arXiv:1707.02275 · **Licence:** [arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute](http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02275) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.02275) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.1707.02275](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1707.02275) · [arXiv 1707.02275](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02275) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2728773317)

**Citations:** 96 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [39](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/barone-2017-parallel-corpus-python-functions-documentation/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Research on translating between source code and natural language has been limited by training data that is tiny, tied to one domain, or noisy. Low-noise sets such as DJANGO and Hearthstone also appear unrealistically easy because they rely on pseudo-code or highly repetitive code. Miceli Barone and Sennrich address this by mining Python 2.7 repositories on GitHub and pairing each top-level function with the docstring its own author wrote. Each function is split into a declaration, a docstring and a body. The code is normalized by parsing and unparsing, and each example is tagged with provenance metadata so that project-level context can be reconstructed. Functions without docstrings go into a separate code-only corpus. As baselines, the authors train Nematus NMT models with BPE in both directions. They also augment code generation through back-translation with synthetic docstrings. The scores are low, at roughly 10–14 BLEU, compared with the 60–85 reported on earlier corpora. This suggests the new resource better reflects real-world difficulty and offers a demanding benchmark.

## Key points
- The main parallel corpus holds 150,370 declaration–docstring–body triples. After duplicate removal it is split into 109,108 training, 2,000 validation and 2,000 test examples. A code-only corpus adds 161,630 functions.
- Every example records where it came from: the owner and name of its repository, the file it appears in, and its line number.
- The baselines use Nematus with Moses tokenization and BPE (vocabulary of 89,500), the Adam optimizer, and Bayesian recurrent dropout. No knowledge of program syntax is used.
- BLEU results (validation/test):
  - Code-to-docstring: 14.03/13.84.
  - Docstring-to-code: 10.32/10.24.
  - Docstring-to-code with back-translation: 10.85/10.90, a gain of about 0.5–0.6 points.
- The data, extraction scripts, system configurations and model outputs are released at github.com/Avmb/code-docstring-corpus.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone and Rico Sennrich. 2017. A parallel corpus of Python functions and documentation strings for automated code documentation and code generation. arXiv:1707.02275.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{barone2017parallel,
  title = {{A parallel corpus of Python functions and documentation strings for automated code documentation and code generation}},
  author = {Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone and Rico Sennrich},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.1707.02275},
  eprint = {1707.02275},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1707.02275}
}
```

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## References

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*Updated 3 November 2026*