Deep Just-In-Time Consistent Comment Update via Source Code Changes

Abstract

During software development and maintenance, code comments are often missing, inadequate, or they do not match the actual code content. In response to this problem, the research community has proposed a method for updating natural language comments based on code changes. However, there are two major limitations of this method that must be addressed: the long-term and non-temporal dependencies in the source code. To address these limitations, we propose a new model called code semantic learning–comment update (CSL2CU). The code semantic learning component of CSL2CU uses a self-attention mechanism and a positional encoding mechanism. It also uses a relative positional representation to model pairwise relationships between source code tags, thereby improving its ability to capture long-term dependencies and non-temporal dependencies of source code tagging ability. The comment-update component of CSL2CU is used to generate new comments based on old comments and code editing. The experimental results show that the CSL2CU model outperforms the three baselines used in exact match, BLEU, METEOR, and SARI.