Code comments are critical for maintaining and comprehending software programs, but they are often missing, mismatched, or outdated in practice. Code comment generation task aims to automatically produce descriptive comments for code snippets. Recently, methods based on the neural encoder-decoder architecture have achieved impressive performance. These methods assume that all the information required to generate comments is encoded in the target function itself, yet in most realistic situations, it is hard to understand a function in isolation from the surrounding context. Furthermore, the global context may contain redundant information that should not be introduced. To address the above issues, we present a novel graph-based learning framework to capture various relations among functions in a class file. Our approach is based on a common real-world scenario in which only a few functions in the source file have human-written comments. Guided by intra-class function relations, our model incorporates contextual information extracted from both the source code and available comments to generate missing comments. We conduct experiments on a Java dataset collected from real-world projects. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms competitive baseline models on all automatic and human evaluation metrics.

Code comments are vital for software maintenance and comprehension, but many software projects suffer from the lack of meaningful and up-to-date comments in practice. This paper presents a novel approach to automatically generate code comments at a function level by targeting object-oriented programming languages. Unlike prior work that only uses information locally available within the target function, our approach leverages broader contextual information by considering all other functions of the same class. To propagate and integrate information beyond the scope of the target function, we design a novel learning framework based on the bidirectional gated recurrent unit and a graph attention network with a pointer mechanism. We apply our approach to produce code comments for Java methods and compare it against four strong baseline methods. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms most methods by a large margin and achieves a comparable result with the state-of-the-art method.