Building Statistical Language Models of Code

We present the Source Code Statistical Language Model data analysis pattern. Statistical language models have been an enabling tool for a wide array of important language technologies. Speech recognition, machine translation, and document summarization (to name a few) all rely on statistical language models to assign probability estimates to natural language utterances or sentences. In this data analysis pattern, we describe the process of building n-gram language models over software source files. We hope that by introducing the empirical software engineering community to best practices that have been established over the years in research for natural languages, statistical language models can become a tool that SE researchers are able to use to explore new research directions.