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ICPC 2021
Tue 18 - Thu 20 May 2021
co-located with ICSE 2021
Tue 18 May 2021 16:55 - 17:05 at ICPC Main Room - Improving Code Quality Chair(s): Venera Arnaoudova

Code comments can help in program comprehension and are considered as important artifacts to help developers in software maintenance. However, the comments are mostly missing or are outdated, specially in complex software projects. As a result, several automatic comment generation models are developed as a solution. The recent models explore the integration of external knowledge resources such as Unified Modeling Language class diagrams to improve the generated comments. In this paper, we propose API2Com, a model that leverages the Application Programming Interface Documentations (API Docs) as a knowledge resource for comment generation. The API Docs include the description of the methods in more details and therefore, can provide better context in the generated comments. The API Docs are used along with the code snippets and Abstract Syntax Trees in our model. We apply the model on a large Java dataset of over 130,000 methods and evaluate it using both Transformer and RNN-base architectures. Interestingly, when API Docs are used, the performance increase is negligible. We therefore run different experiments to reason about the results. For methods that only contain one API, adding API Docs improves the results by 4% BLEU score on average (BLEU score is an automatic evaluation metric used in machine translation). However, as the number of APIs that are used in a method increases, the performance of the model in generating comments decreases due to long documentations used in the input. Our results confirm that the API Docs can be useful in generating better comments, but, new techniques are required to identify the most informative ones in a method rather than using all documentations simultaneously.

Tue 18 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

16:50 - 17:20
16:50
5m
Paper
Towards improving architectural diagram consistency using system descriptors
Early Research Achievement (ERA)
Jalves Nicacio University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, Fabio Petrillo Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada
Pre-print Media Attached
16:55
10m
Paper
API2Com: On the Improvement of Automatically Generated Code Comments Using API Documentations
Replications and Negative Results (RENE)
Ramin Shahbazi , Rishab Sharma , Fatemeh Hendijani Fard University of British Columbia
Pre-print Media Attached
17:05
5m
Paper
Automatic Extraction of Code Dependency in Virtual Reality Software
Early Research Achievement (ERA)
Jacinto Molina University of Texas at San Antonio, Xue Qin Villanova University, Xiaoyin Wang University of Texas at San Antonio
Media Attached
17:10
10m
Paper
FLeCCS: A Technique for Suggesting Fragment-Level Similar Co-change Candidates
Research
Manishankar Mondal Assistant Professor, Khulna University, Chanchal K. Roy University of Saskatchewan, Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan, Kevin Schneider University of Saskatchewan
Media Attached

Information for Participants
Tue 18 May 2021 16:50 - 17:20 at ICPC Main Room - Improving Code Quality Chair(s): Venera Arnaoudova
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