Automated Description Generation for Software Patches

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Vu, Thanh Trong, Bui, Tuan-Dung, Do, Thanh-Dat, Nguyen, Thu-Trang, Vo, Hieu Dinh, Nguyen, Son
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866916412608479232
author Vu, Thanh Trong
Bui, Tuan-Dung
Do, Thanh-Dat
Nguyen, Thu-Trang
Vo, Hieu Dinh
Nguyen, Son
author_facet Vu, Thanh Trong
Bui, Tuan-Dung
Do, Thanh-Dat
Nguyen, Thu-Trang
Vo, Hieu Dinh
Nguyen, Son
contents Software patches are pivotal in refining and evolving codebases, addressing bugs, vulnerabilities, and optimizations. Patch descriptions provide detailed accounts of changes, aiding comprehension and collaboration among developers. However, manual description creation poses challenges in terms of time consumption and variations in quality and detail. In this paper, we propose PATCHEXPLAINER, an approach that addresses these challenges by framing patch description generation as a machine translation task. In PATCHEXPLAINER, we leverage explicit representations of critical elements, historical context, and syntactic conventions. Moreover, the translation model in PATCHEXPLAINER is designed with an awareness of description similarity. Particularly, the model is explicitly trained to recognize and incorporate similarities present in patch descriptions clustered into groups, improving its ability to generate accurate and consistent descriptions across similar patches. The dual objectives maximize similarity and accurately predict affiliating groups. Our experimental results on a large dataset of real-world software patches show that PATCHEXPLAINER consistently outperforms existing methods, with improvements up to 189% in BLEU, 5.7X in Exact Match rate, and 154% in Semantic Similarity, affirming its effectiveness in generating software patch descriptions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03805
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Description Generation for Software Patches
Vu, Thanh Trong
Bui, Tuan-Dung
Do, Thanh-Dat
Nguyen, Thu-Trang
Vo, Hieu Dinh
Nguyen, Son
Software Engineering
Software patches are pivotal in refining and evolving codebases, addressing bugs, vulnerabilities, and optimizations. Patch descriptions provide detailed accounts of changes, aiding comprehension and collaboration among developers. However, manual description creation poses challenges in terms of time consumption and variations in quality and detail. In this paper, we propose PATCHEXPLAINER, an approach that addresses these challenges by framing patch description generation as a machine translation task. In PATCHEXPLAINER, we leverage explicit representations of critical elements, historical context, and syntactic conventions. Moreover, the translation model in PATCHEXPLAINER is designed with an awareness of description similarity. Particularly, the model is explicitly trained to recognize and incorporate similarities present in patch descriptions clustered into groups, improving its ability to generate accurate and consistent descriptions across similar patches. The dual objectives maximize similarity and accurately predict affiliating groups. Our experimental results on a large dataset of real-world software patches show that PATCHEXPLAINER consistently outperforms existing methods, with improvements up to 189% in BLEU, 5.7X in Exact Match rate, and 154% in Semantic Similarity, affirming its effectiveness in generating software patch descriptions.
title Automated Description Generation for Software Patches
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03805