Content Aware Source Code Change Description Generation
We propose to study the generation of descriptions from source code changes by integrating the messages included on code commits and the intra-code documentation inside the source in the form of docstrings. Our hypothesis is that although both types of descriptions are not directly aligned in semantic terms {---}one explaining a change and the other the actual functionality of the code being modified{---} there could be certain common ground that is useful for the generation. To this end, we propose an architecture that uses the source code-docstring relationship to guide the description generation. We discuss the results of the approach comparing against a baseline based on a sequence-to-sequence model, using standard automatic natural language generation metrics as well as with a human study, thus offering a comprehensive view of the feasibility of the approach.
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