Towards a multi-scale approach for source code approximate match report

Finding exact clones in source code can be efficiently handled using classical exact substring or subtree pattern matching techniques inspired from genomics applications. These methods may be wisely employed as a foundation to sketch new techniques highlighting duplicated code chunks presenting minor edits or more extensive modifications at a higher structural scale. The main goal is to improve recall of small near matches and to aggregate them into larger ones to provide a more global view of similarities with a reasonable complexity. These concerns are essential to be able to address a large database of source code projects.