Effective approaches to combining lexical and syntactical information for code summarization. (24th September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Zhou, Ziyi; Yu, Huiqun; Fan, Guisheng
• Is Part Of: Software, practice & experience. Volume 50:Number 12(2020)
• Page Start: 2313
• Page End: 2336
• Publication Date: 2020-09-24
• Subjects: code summarization -- deep learning -- program comprehension; Computer software -- Periodicals; Computer programming -- Periodicals; Computer programs -- Periodicals; 005.3
• DOI: 10.1002/spe.2893
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0038-0644

Abstract

Summary: Natural language summaries of source codes are important during software development and maintenance. Recently, deep learning based models have achieved good performance on the task of automatic code summarization, which encode token sequence or abstract syntax tree (AST) of code with neural networks. However, there has been little work on the efficient combination of lexical and syntactical information of code for better summarization quality. In this paper, we propose two general and effective approaches to leveraging both types of information: a convolutional neural network that aims to better extract vector representation of AST node for downstream models; and a Switch Network that learns an adaptive weight vector to combine different code representations for summary generation. We integrate these approaches into a comprehensive code summarization model, which includes a sequential encoder for token sequence of code and a tree based encoder for its AST. We evaluate our model on a large Java dataset. The experimental results show that our model outperforms several state‐of‐the‐art models on various metrics, and the proposed approaches contribute a lot to the improvements.