Improved Code Summarization via a Graph Neural Network
Automatic source code summarization is the task of generating natural language descriptions for source code. Automatic code summarization is a rapidly expanding research area, especially as the community has taken greater advantage of advances in neural network and AI technologies. In general, source code summarization techniques use the source code as input and outputs a natural language description. Yet a strong consensus is developing that using structural information as input leads to improved performance. The first approaches to use structural information flattened the AST into a sequence. Recently, more complex approaches based on random AST paths or graph neural networks have improved on the models using flattened ASTs. However, the literature still does not describe the using a graph neural network together with source code sequence as separate inputs to a model. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach that uses a graph-based neural architecture that better matches the default structure of the AST to generate these summaries. We evaluate our technique using a data set of 2.1 million Java method-comment pairs and show improvement over four baseline techniques, two from the software engineering literature, and two from machine learning literature.
Tue 14 JulDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
01:30 - 02:30 | Session 4: SummalizationResearch / ERA at ICPC Chair(s): Venera Arnaoudova Washington State University | ||
01:30 15mPaper | Improved Code Summarization via a Graph Neural Network Research Alexander LeClair University Of Notre Dame, Sakib Haque University of Notre Dame, Lingfei Wu IBM Research, Collin McMillan University of Notre Dame Pre-print Media Attached | ||
01:45 15mPaper | BugSum: Deep Context Understanding for Bug Report Summarization Research Haoran Liu National University of Defense Technology, Yue Yu College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China, Shanshan Li National University of Defense Technology, Yong Guo National University of Defense Technology, Deze Wang National University of Defense Technology, Xiaoguang Mao National University of Defense Technology Media Attached | ||
02:00 15mPaper | A Human Study of Comprehension and Code Summarization Research Sean Stapleton University of Michigan, Yashmeet Gambhir University of Michigan, Alexander LeClair University Of Notre Dame, Zachary Eberhart , Westley Weimer University of Michigan, USA, Kevin Leach University of Michigan, Yu Huang University of Michigan Pre-print Media Attached | ||
02:15 15mPaper | Linguistic Documentation of Software History ERA Media Attached |