Boyan Xu


2020

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TAG : Type Auxiliary Guiding for Code Comment Generation
Ruichu Cai | Zhihao Liang | Boyan Xu | Zijian Li | Yuexing Hao | Yao Chen
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Existing leading code comment generation approaches with the structure-to-sequence framework ignores the type information of the interpretation of the code, e.g., operator, string, etc. However, introducing the type information into the existing framework is non-trivial due to the hierarchical dependence among the type information. In order to address the issues above, we propose a Type Auxiliary Guiding encoder-decoder framework for the code comment generation task which considers the source code as an N-ary tree with type information associated with each node. Specifically, our framework is featured with a Type-associated Encoder and a Type-restricted Decoder which enables adaptive summarization of the source code. We further propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning method to resolve the training difficulties of our proposed framework. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our framework with both the auto-evaluated metrics and case studies.