English

STACC: Code Comment Classification using SentenceTransformers

Software Engineering 2023-03-08 v2 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Code comments are a key resource for information about software artefacts. Depending on the use case, only some types of comments are useful. Thus, automatic approaches to classify these comments have been proposed. In this work, we address this need by proposing, STACC, a set of SentenceTransformers-based binary classifiers. These lightweight classifiers are trained and tested on the NLBSE Code Comment Classification tool competition dataset, and surpass the baseline by a significant margin, achieving an average F1 score of 0.74 against the baseline of 0.31, which is an improvement of 139%. A replication package, as well as the models themselves, are publicly available.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.13149,
  title  = {STACC: Code Comment Classification using SentenceTransformers},
  author = {Ali Al-Kaswan and Maliheh Izadi and Arie van Deursen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.13149},
  year   = {2023}
}