New Initiative: The Naturalness of Software

Abstract

This paper describes a new research consortium, studying the Naturalness of Software. This initiative is supported by a pair of grants by the US National Science Foundation, totaling $2,600,000: the first, exploratory ("EAGER") grant of $600,000 helped kickstart an inter-disciplinary effort, and demonstrate feasibility; a follow-on full grant of $2,000,000 was recently awarded. The initiative is led by the author, who is at UC Davis, and includes investigators from Iowa State University and Carnegie-Mellon University (Language Technologies Institute).