Automatic Source Code Summarization of Context for Java Methods

Abstract

Source code summarization is the task of creating readable summaries that describe the functionality of software. Source code summarization is a critical component of documentation generation, for example as Javadocs formed from short paragraphs attached to each method in a Java program. At present, a majority of source code summarization is manual, in that the paragraphs are written by human experts. However, new automated technologies are becoming feasible. These automated techniques have been shown to be effective in select situations, though a key weakness is that they do not explain the source code's context. That is, they can describe the behavior of a Java method, but not why the method exists or what role it plays in the software. In this paper, we propose a source code summarization technique that writes English descriptions of Java methods by analyzing how those methods are invoked. We then performed two user studies to evaluate our approach. First, we compared our generated summaries to summaries written manually by experts. Then, we compared our summaries to summaries written by a state-of-the-art automatic summarization tool. We found that while our approach does not reach the quality of human-written summaries, we do improve over the state-of-the-art summarization tool in several dimensions by a statistically-significant margin.