BashExplainer: Retrieval-Augmented Bash Code Comment Generation based on Fine-tuned CodeBERT

Abstract

Developers use shell commands for many tasks, such as file system management, network control, and process management. Bash is one of the most commonly used shells and plays an important role in Linux system development and maintenance. Due to the language flexibility of Bash code, developers who are not familiar with Bash often have difficulty understanding the purpose and functionality of Bash code. In this study, we study Bash code comment generation problem and proposed an automatic method BASHEXPLAINER based on two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we train a Bash encoder by fine-tuning CodeBERT on our constructed Bash code corpus. In the second stage, we first retrieve the most similar code from the code repository for the target code based on semantic and lexical similarity. Then we use the trained Bash encoder to generate two vector representations. Finally, we fuse these two vector representations via the fusion layer and generate the code comment through the decoder. To show the competitiveness of our proposed method, we construct a high-quality corpus by combining the corpus shared in the previous NL2Bash study and the corpus shared in the NLC2CMD competition. This corpus contains 10,592 Bash codes and corresponding comments. Then we selected ten baselines from previous studies on automatic code comment generation, which cover information retrieval methods, deep learning methods, and hybrid methods. The experimental results show that in terms of the performance measures BLEU-3/4, METEOR, and ROUGR-L, BASHEXPLAINER can outperform all baselines by at least 8.75%, 9.29%, 4.77% and 3.86%. Then we design ablation experiments to show the component setting rationality of BASHEXPLAINER. Later, we conduct a human study to further show the competitiveness of BASHEXPLAINER. Finally, we develop a browser plug-in based on BASHEXPLAINER to facilitate the understanding of the Bash code for developers.