Improving topic model source code summarization

PW McBurney, C Liu, C McMillan… - Proceedings of the 22nd …, 2014 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on program comprehension, 2014dl.acm.org
In this paper, we present an emerging source code summarization technique that uses topic
modeling to select keywords and topics as summaries for source code. Our approach
organizes the topics in source code into a hierarchy, with more general topics near the top of
the hierarchy. In this way, we present the software's highest-level functionality first, before
lower-level details. This is an advantage over previous approaches based on topic models,
that only present groups of related keywords without a hierarchy. We conducted a …
In this paper, we present an emerging source code summarization technique that uses topic modeling to select keywords and topics as summaries for source code. Our approach organizes the topics in source code into a hierarchy, with more general topics near the top of the hierarchy. In this way, we present the software's highest-level functionality first, before lower-level details. This is an advantage over previous approaches based on topic models, that only present groups of related keywords without a hierarchy. We conducted a preliminary user study that found our approach selects keywords and topics that the participants found to be accurate in a majority of cases.
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