Towards automatically generating summary comments for Java methods

  • Authors:

  • Giriprasad Sridhara;Emily Hill;Divya Muppaneni;Lori Pollock;K. Vijay-Shanker

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA;University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA;University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA;University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA;University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Studies have shown that good comments can help programmers quickly understand what a method does, aiding program comprehension and software maintenance. Unfortunately, few software projects adequately comment the code. One way to overcome the lack of human-written summary comments, and guard against obsolete comments, is to automatically generate them. In this paper, we present a novel technique to automatically generate descriptive summary comments for Java methods. Given the signature and body of a method, our automatic comment generator identifies the content for the summary and generates natural language text that summarizes the method's overall actions. According to programmers who judged our generated comments, the summaries are accurate, do not miss important content, and are reasonably concise.