MASc seminar - Edmund Wong

Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:00 am - 10:00 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Candidate

Edmund Wong

Title

Mining Question and Answer Sites for Automatic Comment Generation

Supervisor

Tan, Lin

Abstract

Code comments improve software maintainability, programming productivity, and software reliability. To address the comment scarcity issue in many projects and save developers time in writing comments, we propose a new, general automatic comment generation approach, which mines comments from a large programming Question and Answer (Q&A) site. Q&A sites allow programmers to post questions and receive solutions, which contain code segments together with their descriptions, referred to as code-description mappings. We develop AutoComment to extract such mappings, and leverage them to generate description comments automatically for similar code segments matched in open source projects.

We apply AutoComment to analyze 92,140 Java and Android tagged Q&A posts to extract 132,767 code-description mappings, which help AutoComment generate 102 comments automatically for 23 Java and Android projects. The user study results show that the majority of the participants consider the generated comments accurate, adequate, concise, and useful in helping them understand the code.