Journal of Innovation Information Technology and Application (JINITA)
Vol 8 No 1 (2026): JINITA, June 2026

Evaluating Cross-Language Structural Generalization of the Unified Abstract Syntax Tree

Mardi Utomo (Universitas Stikubank)
Ema Utami (Universitas Amikom Yogyakarta)
Kusrini (Universitas Amikom Yogyakarta)
Arief Setyanto (Universitas Amikom Yogyakarta)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Jun 2026

Abstract

Cross-language code analysis requires syntax-aware representations that can reduce language-specific syntactic variation while preserving comparable program structure. Although unified Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) representations have been proposed, empirical evidence on their representation-level structural behavior across datasets and programming languages remains limited. This paper evaluates the structural generalization of a Unified AST representation as a schema-level abstraction, not as a parser-free or full semantic equivalence mechanism. The Unified AST schema is constructed from the CodeXGLUE code-to-text dataset covering Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, and Go. Its generalization is then examined on function-level aligned benchmarks from CodeXGLUE code-to-code translation (Java-C#) and multilingual HumanEval (Java, JavaScript, Go, Python, C++, and Rust). Tree Edit Distance (TED) similarity is used as the primary structural metric, while cosine similarity, BLEU, compression ratio, and identifier precision-recall are treated as auxiliary indicators of lexical similarity, reconstruction fidelity, compactness, and identifier retention. The results show an average TED similarity of 0.77 on CodeXGLUE code-to-code translation and 0.60 on HumanEval. These findings indicate that the Unified AST can preserve cross-language structural patterns under aligned benchmark assumptions, although it does not prove behavioral equivalence and remains dependent on language-specific parsing during AST extraction

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

jinita

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management Engineering

Description

Software Engineering, Mobile Technology and Applications, Robotics, Database System, Information Engineering, Interactive Multimedia, Computer Networking, Information System, Computer Architecture, Embedded System, Computer Security, Digital Forensic Human-Computer Interaction, Virtual/Augmented ...