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Comments, or natural language descriptions of source code, are standard practice among software developers. By communicating important aspects of the code such as functionality and usage, comments help with software project maintenance.…
We formulate the novel task of automatically updating an existing natural language comment based on changes in the body of code it accompanies. We propose an approach that learns to correlate changes across two distinct language…
Ensuring semantic consistency between source code and its accompanying comments is crucial for program comprehension, effective debugging, and long-term maintainability. Comment inconsistency arises when developers modify code but neglect…
In software development and maintenance, code comments can help developers understand source code, and improve communication among developers. However, developers sometimes neglect to update the corresponding comment when changing the code,…
Comments within source code are essential for developers to comprehend the code's purpose and ensure its correct usage. However, as codebases evolve, maintaining an accurate alignment between the comments and the code becomes increasingly…
Code comments are essential for clarifying code functionality, improving readability, and facilitating collaboration among developers. Despite their importance, comments often become outdated, leading to inconsistencies with the…
A central function of code review is to increase understanding; helping reviewers understand a code change aids in knowledge transfer and finding bugs. Comments in code largely serve a similar purpose, helping future readers understand the…
As an integral part of source code files, code comments help improve program readability and comprehension. However, developers sometimes do not comment on their program code adequately due to the incurred extra efforts, lack of relevant…
Software comments are critical for human understanding of software, and as such many comment generation techniques have been proposed. However, we find that a systematic evaluation of the factual accuracy of generated comments is rare; only…
Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, unclear conventions for writing good comments, and the lack of…
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…
Comments are an integral part of software development; they are natural language descriptions associated with source code elements. Understanding explicit associations can be useful in improving code comprehensibility and maintaining the…
Code comments play a crucial role in software development, as they provide programmers with practical information, allowing them to understand better the intent and semantics of the underpinning code. Nevertheless, developers tend to leave…
Comment updating is an emerging task in software evolution that aims to automatically revise source code comments in accordance with code changes. This task plays a vital role in maintaining code-comment consistency throughout software…
The programming skill is one crucial ability for Large Language Models (LLMs), necessitating a deep understanding of programming languages (PLs) and their correlation with natural languages (NLs). We examine the impact of pre-training data…
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…
Most software maintenance and evolution tasks require developers to understand the source code of their software systems. Software developers usually inspect class comments to gain knowledge about program behavior, regardless of the…
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…
When changing code, developers sometimes neglect updating the related comments, bringing inconsistent or outdated comments. These comments increase the cost of program understanding and greatly reduce software maintainability. Researchers…
Good comments help developers understand software faster and provide better maintenance. However, comments are often missing, generally inaccurate, or out of date. Many of these problems can be avoided by automatic comment generation. This…