Deep Code Comment Generation

During software maintenance, code comments help developers comprehend programs and reduce additional time spent on reading and navigating source code. Unfortunately, these comments are often mismatched, missing or outdated in the software projects. Developers have to infer the functionality from the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2018 IEEE/ACM 26th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) pp. 200 - 210
Main Authors: Hu, Xing, Li, Ge, Xia, Xin, Lo, David, Jin, Zhi
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 01.05.2018
Subjects:
Artificial neural networks
Codes
comment generation
Deep learning
Java
Machine translation
Measurement
Navigation
program comprehension
Software development management
Software maintenance
Source coding
ISSN:2643-7171
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:During software maintenance, code comments help developers comprehend programs and reduce additional time spent on reading and navigating source code. Unfortunately, these comments are often mismatched, missing or outdated in the software projects. Developers have to infer the functionality from the source code. This paper proposes a new approach named DeepCom to automatically generate code comments for Java methods. The generated comments aim to help developers understand the functionality of Java methods. DeepCom applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to learn from a large code corpus and generates comments from learned features. We use a deep neural network that analyzes structural information of Java methods for better comments generation. We conduct experiments on a large-scale Java corpus built from 9,714 open source projects from GitHub. We evaluate the experimental results on a machine translation metric. Experimental results demonstrate that our method DeepCom outperforms the state-of-the-art by a substantial margin.
ISSN:2643-7171
DOI:10.1145/3196321.3196334