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Automatic source code analysis in key areas of software engineering, such as code security, can benefit from Machine Learning (ML). However, many standard ML approaches require a numeric representation of data and cannot be applied directly…

When writing source code, programmers have varying levels of freedom when it comes to the creation and use of identifiers. Do they habitually use the same identifiers, names that are different to those used by others? Is it then possible to…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

When lambda expressions were introduced to the Java programming language as part of the release of Java 8 in 2014, they were the language's first step into functional programming. Since lambda expressions are still relatively new, not all…

Source Code Summarization is the task of writing short, natural language descriptions of source code. The main use for these descriptions is in software documentation e.g. the one-sentence Java method descriptions in JavaDocs. Code…

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…

Java remains one of the most popular programming languages in education. Although Java programming education is well supported by study materials, learners also need more immediate support on the problems they face in their own code. When…

Dynamically typed programming languages such as JavaScript and Python defer type checking to run time. In order to maximize performance, dynamic language VM implementations must attempt to eliminate redundant dynamic type checks. However,…

Software testing is one of the very important Quality Assurance (QA) components. A lot of researchers deal with the testing process in terms of tester motivation and how tests should or should not be written. However, it is not known from…

Descriptive comments play a crucial role in the software engineering process. They decrease development time, enable better bug detection, and facilitate the reuse of previously written code. However, comments are commonly the last of a…

Identifiers make up a majority of the text in code. They are one of the most basic mediums through which developers describe the code they create and understand the code that others create. Therefore, understanding the patterns latent in…

Bots are frequently used in Github repositories to automate repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. They communicate with human actors through comments. While detecting their presence is…

This paper illustrates an empirical study of the working efficiency of machine learning techniques in classifying code review text by semantic meaning. The code review comments from the source control repository in GitHub were extracted for…

To effectively guide the exploration of the code transform space for automated code evolution techniques, we present in this paper the first approach for structurally predicting code transforms at the level of AST nodes using conditional…

Transformer-based pre-trained models have recently achieved great results in solving many software engineering tasks including automatic code completion which is a staple in a developer's toolkit. While many have striven to improve the…

Reusing code can produce duplicate or near-duplicate code clones in code repositories. Current code clone detection techniques, like Program Dependence Graphs, rely on code structure and their dependencies to detect clones. These techniques…

A question of some interest is how to characterize the amount of information that a prior puts into a statistical analysis. Rather than a general characterization, we provide an approach to characterizing the amount of information a prior…

Generative classifiers offer potential advantages over their discriminative counterparts, namely in the areas of data efficiency, robustness to data shift and adversarial examples, and zero-shot learning (Ng and Jordan,2002; Yogatama et…

Proponents of software verification have argued that simpler code is easier to verify: that is, that verification tools issue fewer false positives and require less human intervention when analyzing simpler code. We empirically validate…

Identifiers, such as method and variable names, form a large portion of source code. Therefore, low-quality identifiers can substantially hinder code comprehension. To support developers in using meaningful identifiers, several…