Automatically Extracting Subroutine Summary Descriptions from Unstructured Comments

Abstract

descriptions of subroutines are short (usually one-sentence) natural language explanations of a subroutine's behavior and purpose in a program. These summaries are ubiquitous in documentation, and many tools such as JavaDocs and Doxygen generate documentation built around them. And yet, extracting summaries from unstructured source code repositories remains a difficult research problem -it is very difficult to generate clean structured documentation unless the summaries are annotated by programmers. This becomes a problem in large repositories of legacy code, since it is cost prohibitive to retroactively annotate summaries in dozens or hundreds of old programs. Likewise, it is a problem for creators of automatic documentation generation algorithms, since these algorithms usually must learn from large annotated datasets, which do not exist for many programming languages. In this paper, we present a semi-automated approach via crowdsourcing and a fully-automated approach for annotating summaries from unstructured code comments. We present experiments validating the approaches, and provide recommendations and cost estimates for automatically annotating large repositories.

Dialogue Management for Interactive API Search

“…The libssh dataset comprises 264 functions, while the Allegro dataset comprises 917 functions. We chose these APIs for three reasons: 1) C APIs do not include class hierarchies, enabling an emphasis on concept-based search, 2) the size and domain differences help us perceive how well the policies can generalize to a broader range of APIs, and 3) these were the APIs used in the API search experiments by Eberhart et al [44].…”

“…The complete lists of search tasks are available in our online appendix (see Section VII). We based these questions on search tasks used in related literature [61], [62], [44]. Each question targeted a particular function in the API.…”

“…This is the action space within which our dialogue manager can operate. We started with the dataset provided by Eberhart et al [44] of API help dialogues, then refined the set of possible dialogue acts based on other related literature. We show the action space in Table I.…”