{Artem Aliev Sergey Nikolenko Maxim Omelchenko Sergey Kovalchuk Vadim Lomshakov}

Abstract

We study the ability of pretrained large language models (LLM) to answer questions from online question answering fora such as Stack Overflow. We consider question-answer pairs where the main part of the answer consists of source code. On two benchmark datasets—CoNaLa and a newly collected dataset based on Stack Overflow—we investigate how a closed-book question answering system can be improved by fine-tuning the LLM for the downstream task, prompt engineering, and data preprocessing. We use publicly available autoregressive language models such as GPT-Neo, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder, and after the proposed fine-tuning achieve a BLEU score of 0.4432 on the CoNaLa test set, significantly exceeding previous state of the art for this task.