Pseudogen: A Tool to Automatically Generate Pseudo-Code from Source Code

Abstract

Understanding the behavior of source code written in an unfamiliar programming language is difficult. One way to aid understanding of difficult code is to add corresponding pseudo-code, which describes in detail the workings of the code in a natural language such as English. In spite of its usefulness, most source code does not have corresponding pseudo-code because it is tedious to create. This paper demonstrates a tool Pseudogen that makes it possible to automatically generate pseudo-code from source code using statistical machine translation (SMT). Pseudogen currently supports generation of English or Japanese pseudo-code from Python source code, and the SMT framework makes it easy for users to create new generators for their preferred source code/pseudo-code pairs.