# You Augment Me: Exploring ChatGPT-based Data Augmentation for Semantic Code Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05542 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05542/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [LLM Hallucinations in Practical Code Generation: Phenomena, Mechanism, and Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20550/) (2024)
- [Agents in Software Engineering: Survey, Landscape, and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09030/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Study of Agent Developer Practices in AI Agent Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01939/) (2025)
- [AlignCoder: Aligning Retrieval with Target Intent for Repository-Level Code Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19697/) (2026)
- [CodeScout: Contextual Problem Statement Enhancement for Software Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05744/) (2026)
- [ShortCoder: Knowledge-Augmented Syntax Optimization for Token-Efficient Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09703/) (2026)
- [DRAINCODE: Stealthy Energy Consumption Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation via Context Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20615/) (2026)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Code Search without Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07740/) (2025)
- [PhoenixRepair: Rethinking Repair Strategy Exploration in Software Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18859/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Critical Token-Aware Retrieval for Repository-Level Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01601/) (2026)
- [Efficient SWE Agent Benchmarking via Trajectory-Aware Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01603/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Code search plays a crucial role in software development, enabling developers to retrieve and reuse code using natural language queries. While the performance of code search models improves with an increase in high-quality data, obtaining such data can be challenging and expensive. Recently, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have made remarkable progress in both natural and programming language understanding and generation, offering user-friendly interaction via simple prompts. Inspired by these advancements, we propose a novel approach ChatDANCE, which utilizes high-quality and diverse augmented data generated by a large language model and leverages a filtering mechanism to eliminate low-quality augmentations. Specifically, we first propose a set of ChatGPT prompting rules that are specifically designed for source code and queries. Then, we leverage ChatGPT to rewrite code and queries based on the according prompts and then propose a filtering mechanism which trains a cross-encoder from the backbone model UniXcoder to filter out code and query pairs with low matching scores. Finally, we re-train the backbone model using the obtained high-quality augmented data. Experimental results show that ChatDANCE achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving the best baseline by 13.2% (R@1) and 7% (MRR). Surprisingly, we find that this augment-filter-retrain strategy enables the backbone model (UniXcoder) to self-grow. Moreover, extensive experiments show the effectiveness of each component and ChatDANCE has stable performance under different hyperparameter settings. In addition, we conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses to investigate why ChatDANCE works well and find that it learns a more uniform distribution of representations and effectively aligns the code and query spaces.