English
Related papers

Related papers: Comment Generation for Source Code: State of the A…

200 papers

Many software analysis methods have come to rely on machine learning approaches. Code segmentation - the process of decomposing source code into meaningful blocks - can augment these methods by featurizing code, reducing noise, and limiting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-07-23 Jacob Dormuth , Ben Gelman , Jessica Moore , David Slater

Code comments are important artifacts in software systems and play a paramount role in many software engineering (SE) tasks related to maintenance and program comprehension. However, while it is widely accepted that high quality matters in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Pooja Rani , Arianna Blasi , Nataliia Stulova , Sebastiano Panichella , Alessandra Gorla , Oscar Nierstrasz

Code reviews are popular in both industrial and open source projects. The benefits of code reviews are widely recognized and include better code quality and lower likelihood of introducing bugs. However, since code review is a manual…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Rosalia Tufano , Luca Pascarella , Michele Tufano , Denys Poshyvanyk , Gabriele Bavota

Code comment generation techniques aim to generate natural language descriptions for source code. There are two orthogonal approaches for this task, i.e., information retrieval (IR) based and neural-based methods. Recent studies have…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Huang Yuchao , Wei Moshi , Wang Song , Wang Junjie , Wang Qing

Appropriate comments of code snippets provide insight for code functionality, which are helpful for program comprehension. However, due to the great cost of authoring with the comments, many code projects do not contain adequate comments.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Wenhao Zheng , Hong-Yu Zhou , Ming Li , Jianxin Wu

Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Delano Oliveira , Reydne Santos , Benedito de Oliveira , Martin Monperrus , Fernando Castor , Fernanda Madeiral

Existing automatic code comment generators mainly focus on producing a general description of functionality for a given code snippet without considering developer intentions. However, in real-world practice, comments are complicated, which…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Fangwen Mu , Xiao Chen , Lin Shi , Song Wang , Qing Wang

Code generation aims to understand the problem description and generate corresponding code snippets, where existing works generally decompose such complex tasks into intermediate steps by prompting strategies, such as Chain-of-Thought and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Yijie Chen , Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng , Yufeng Chen , Jinan Xu , Jie Zhou

Assessing code comment quality is known to be a difficult problem. A number of coding style guidelines have been created with the aim to encourage writing of informative, readable, and consistent comments. However, it is not clear from the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Pooja Rani , Suada Abukar , Nataliia Stulova , Alexandre Bergel , Oscar Nierstrasz

Comments are an important part of the source code and are a primary source of documentation. This has driven interest in using large bodies of comments to train or evaluate tools that consume or produce them -- such as generating oracles or…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Sergey Matskevich , Colin S. Gordon

Nowadays, Computer Science tightly entered all spheres of human activity. To improve quality and speed of development process, it is important to help programmers improve their working conditions. This paper proposes a vision on exploring…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Rozaliya Amirova , Sergey Masyagin , Anastasia Reprintseva , Giancarlo Succi , Herman Tarasau

Code comment generation aims at generating natural language descriptions for a code snippet to facilitate developers' program comprehension activities. Despite being studied for a long time, a bottleneck for existing approaches is that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Mingyang Geng , Shangwen Wang , Dezun Dong , Haotian Wang , Ge Li , Zhi Jin , Xiaoguang Mao , Xiangke Liao

Descriptive code comments are essential for supporting code comprehension and maintenance. We propose the task of automatically generating comments for overriding methods. We formulate a novel framework which accommodates the unique…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Jiyang Zhang , Sheena Panthaplackel , Pengyu Nie , Raymond J. Mooney , Junyi Jessy Li , Milos Gligoric

User feedback is becoming an increasingly important source of information for requirements engineering, user interface design, and software engineering in general. Nowadays, user feedback is largely available and easily accessible in social…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Walid Maalej , Volodymyr Biryuk , Jialiang Wei , Fabian Panse

Code comment generation is a crucial task in the field of automatic software development. Most previous neural comment generation systems used an encoder-decoder neural network and encoded only information from source code as input.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Bolin Wei

Natural language comments convey key aspects of source code such as implementation, usage, and pre- and post-conditions. Failure to update comments accordingly when the corresponding code is modified introduces inconsistencies, which is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Sheena Panthaplackel , Junyi Jessy Li , Milos Gligoric , Raymond J. Mooney

The automation of code review has been tackled by several researchers with the goal of reducing its cost. The adoption of deep learning in software engineering pushed the automation to new boundaries, with techniques imitating developers in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Rosalia Tufano , Ozren Dabić , Antonio Mastropaolo , Matteo Ciniselli , Gabriele Bavota

Software development is a collaborative process that involves various interactions among individuals and teams. TODO comments in source code play a critical role in managing and coordinating diverse tasks during this process. However, this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Haoye Wang , Zhipeng Gao , Tingting Bi , John Grundy , Xinyu Wang , Minghui Wu , Xiaohu Yang

The relationship of comments to code, and in particular, the task of generating useful comments given the code, has long been of interest. The earliest approaches have been based on strong syntactic theories of comment-structures, and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-10-06 David Gros , Hariharan Sezhiyan , Prem Devanbu , Zhou Yu

The use of large language models like ChatGPT in code review offers promising efficiency gains but also raises concerns about correctness and safety. Existing evaluation methods for code review generation either rely on automatic…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Robert Heumüller , Frank Ortmeier