Bug localization based on syntactical and semantic information of source code

Abstract

The existing software bug localization models treat the source file as natural language, which leads to the loss of syntactical and structure information of the source file. A bug localization model based on syntactical and semantic information of source code is proposed. Firstly, abstract syntax tree (AST) is divided based on node category to obtain statement sequence. The statement tree is encoded into vectors to capture lexical and syntactical knowledge at the statement level. Secondly, the source code is transformed into vector representation by the sequence naturalness of the statement. Therefore, the problem of gradient vanishing and explosion caused by a large AST size is obviated when using AST to the represent source code. Finally, the correlation between bug reports and source files are comprehensively analyzed from three aspects of syntax, semantics and text to locate the buggy code. Experiments show that compared with other standard models, the proposed model improves the performance of bug localization, and it has good advantages in mean reciprocal rank (MRR), mean average precision (MAP) and Top N Rank.