Using Artificial Intelligence in Source Code Summarization: A Review

Abstract

Source code summarization is the methodology of generating the description from the source code. The summary of the source code gives the brief idea of the functionality performed by the source code. Summary of the code is always necessary for software maintenance. Summaries are not only beneficial for software maintenance but also for code categorization and retrieval. Generation of summary in an automated fashion instead of manual intervention can save the time and efforts. Artificial Intelligence is a very popular branch in the field of computer science that demonstrates machine intelligence and covers a wide range of applications. This paper focuses on the use of Artificial Intelligence for source code summarization. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) are considered to be the subsets of Artificial Intelligence. Thus, this paper presents a critical review of various NLP and ML techniques implemented so far for generating summaries from the source code and points out research challenges in this field.