CAST: Enhancing Code Summarization with Hierarchical Splitting and Reconstruction of Abstract Syntax Trees

Ensheng Shi, Yanlin Wang, Lun Du, Hongyu Zhang, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang, Hongbin Sun


Abstract
Code summarization aims to generate concise natural language descriptions of source code, which can help improve program comprehension and maintenance. Recent studies show that syntactic and structural information extracted from abstract syntax trees (ASTs) is conducive to summary generation. However, existing approaches fail to fully capture the rich information in ASTs because of the large size/depth of ASTs. In this paper, we propose a novel model CAST that hierarchically splits and reconstructs ASTs. First, we hierarchically split a large AST into a set of subtrees and utilize a recursive neural network to encode the subtrees. Then, we aggregate the embeddings of subtrees by reconstructing the split ASTs to get the representation of the complete AST. Finally, AST representation, together with source code embedding obtained by a vanilla code token encoder, is used for code summarization. Extensive experiments, including the ablation study and the human evaluation, on benchmarks have demonstrated the power of CAST. To facilitate reproducibility, our code and data are available at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/CAST.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.332
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4053–4062
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.332
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.332
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ensheng Shi, Yanlin Wang, Lun Du, Hongyu Zhang, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang, and Hongbin Sun. 2021. CAST: Enhancing Code Summarization with Hierarchical Splitting and Reconstruction of Abstract Syntax Trees. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4053–4062, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CAST: Enhancing Code Summarization with Hierarchical Splitting and Reconstruction of Abstract Syntax Trees (Shi et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.332.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.332.mp4
Code
 DeepSoftwareAnalytics/CAST