{"id":804475,"date":"2021-12-13T23:11:17","date_gmt":"2021-12-14T07:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=804475"},"modified":"2021-12-14T04:25:19","modified_gmt":"2021-12-14T12:25:19","slug":"on-the-evaluation-of-neural-code-summarization","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/on-the-evaluation-of-neural-code-summarization\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Evaluation of Neural Code Summarization"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source<\/span> code<\/span> summaries<\/span> are<\/span> important<\/span> for<\/span> the<\/span> com<\/span>prehension<\/span> and<\/span> maintenance<\/span> of<\/span> programs.<\/span> However,<\/span> there<\/span> are <\/span>plenty<\/span> of<\/span> programs<\/span> with<\/span> missing,<\/span> outdated,<\/span> or<\/span> mismatched <\/span>summaries.<\/span> Recently,<\/span> deep<\/span> learning<\/span> techniques<\/span> have<\/span> been<\/span> ex<\/span>ploited<\/span> to<\/span> automatically<\/span> generate<\/span> summaries<\/span> for<\/span> given<\/span> code <\/span>snippets.<\/span> To<\/span> achieve<\/span> a<\/span> profound<\/span> understanding<\/span> of<\/span> how<\/span> far<\/span> we <\/span>are<\/span> from<\/span> solving<\/span> this <\/span>problem,<\/span> in<\/span> this<\/span> paper,<\/span> we<\/span> conduct<\/span> a <\/span>systematic<\/span> and<\/span> in-depth<\/span> analysis<\/span> of<\/span> five<\/span> state-of-the-art<\/span> neural <\/span>source code summarization models on three widely used datasets. <\/span>Our evaluation results suggest that: (1) The BLEU metric, which <\/span>is<\/span> widely<\/span> used<\/span> by<\/span> existing<\/span> work<\/span> for<\/span> evaluating<\/span> the<\/span> performance <\/span>of<\/span> the<\/span> summarization<\/span> models,<\/span> has<\/span> many<\/span> variants.<\/span> Ignoring<\/span> the <\/span>differences<\/span> among<\/span> the<\/span> BLEU<\/span> variants<\/span> could<\/span> affect<\/span> the<\/span> validity <\/span>of<\/span> the<\/span> claimed<\/span> results.<\/span> Furthermore,<\/span> we<\/span> discover<\/span> an<\/span> important, <\/span>previously unknown bug about BLEU calculation in a commonly-<\/span>used software package. (2) Code pre-processing choices can have <\/span>a<\/span> large<\/span> impact<\/span> on<\/span> the<\/span> summarization<\/span> performance,<\/span> therefore <\/span>they<\/span> should<\/span> not<\/span> be<\/span> ignored.<\/span> (3)<\/span> Some<\/span> important<\/span> characteristics <\/span>of<\/span> datasets<\/span> (corpus<\/span> size,<\/span> data<\/span> splitting<\/span> method,<\/span> and<\/span> duplication <\/span>ratio)<\/span> have<\/span> a<\/span> significant<\/span> impact<\/span> on<\/span> model<\/span> evaluation.<\/span> Based<\/span> on <\/span>the<\/span> experimental<\/span> results,<\/span> we<\/span> give<\/span> some<\/span> actionable<\/span> guidelines<\/span> on <\/span>more<\/span> systematic<\/span> ways<\/span> for<\/span> evaluating<\/span> code<\/span> summarization<\/span> and <\/span>choosing<\/span> the<\/span> best<\/span> method<\/span> in<\/span> different<\/span> scenarios.<\/span> We<\/span> also<\/span> suggest <\/span>possible<\/span> future<\/span> research<\/span> directions.<\/span> We<\/span> believe<\/span> that<\/span> our<\/span> results <\/span>can<\/span> be<\/span> of<\/span> great<\/span> help<\/span> for<\/span> practitioners<\/span> and<\/span> researchers<\/span> in<\/span> this <\/span>interesting<\/span> area.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source code summaries are important for the comprehension and maintenance of programs. However, there are plenty of programs with missing, outdated, or mismatched summaries. Recently, deep learning techniques have been exploited to automatically generate summaries for given code snippets. To achieve a profound understanding of how far we are from solving this problem, in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"International Conference on Software Engineering 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