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Can a machine find and fix a Semantic Bug? A Semantic Bug is a deviation from the expected program behaviour that causes to produce incorrect outputs for certain inputs. To identify this category of bugs, the knowledge on the expected program behaviour is essential. The reason is that a program with a semantic bug does not fail (i.e., crash or hang) in the middle of the execution in most scenarios. Thus, only a human (a user or a developer) knowing the correct program behaviour can detect this kind of bug by observing the output. However, identifying bugs solely through human effort is not practical for all software. A Test Oracle is any procedure used to differentiate the correct and incorrect behaviours of a program. This dissertation mainly focuses on developing learning techniques to produce Automated Test Oracles for programs with semantic bugs. Also, discovering methods to incorporate human knowledge effectively for the learning techniques is another concern. The automated test oracles could make semantic bug detection more efficient. Also, such test oracles could guide Automated Program Repair tools to generate more accurate fixes for semantic bugs.
Charaka Geethal (Mon,) studied this question.