Towards Realistic Evaluation of Commit Message Generation by Matching Online and Offline Settings

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Hauptverfasser: Tsvetkov, Petr, Eliseeva, Aleksandra, Dig, Danny, Bezzubov, Alexander, Golubev, Yaroslav, Bryksin, Timofey, Zharov, Yaroslav
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Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Tsvetkov, Petr
Eliseeva, Aleksandra
Dig, Danny
Bezzubov, Alexander
Golubev, Yaroslav
Bryksin, Timofey
Zharov, Yaroslav
author_facet Tsvetkov, Petr
Eliseeva, Aleksandra
Dig, Danny
Bezzubov, Alexander
Golubev, Yaroslav
Bryksin, Timofey
Zharov, Yaroslav
contents When a Commit Message Generation (CMG) system is integrated into the IDEs and other products at JetBrains, we perform online evaluation based on user acceptance of the generated messages. However, performing online experiments with every change to a CMG system is troublesome, as each iteration affects users and requires time to collect enough statistics. On the other hand, offline evaluation, a prevalent approach in the research literature, facilitates fast experiments but employs automatic metrics that are not guaranteed to represent the preferences of real users. In this work, we describe a novel way we employed to deal with this problem at JetBrains, by leveraging an online metric - the number of edits users introduce before committing the generated messages to the VCS - to select metrics for offline experiments. To support this new type of evaluation, we develop a novel markup collection tool mimicking the real workflow with a CMG system, collect a dataset with 57 pairs consisting of commit messages generated by GPT-4 and their counterparts edited by human experts, and design and verify a way to synthetically extend such a dataset. Then, we use the final dataset of 656 pairs to study how the widely used similarity metrics correlate with the online metric reflecting the real users' experience. Our results indicate that edit distance exhibits the highest correlation with the online metric, whereas commonly used similarity metrics such as BLEU and METEOR demonstrate low correlation. This contradicts the previous studies on similarity metrics for CMG, suggesting that user interactions with a CMG system in real-world settings differ significantly from the responses by human labelers within controlled environments. We release all the code and the dataset to support future research in the field: https://jb.gg/cmg-evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_12046
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Realistic Evaluation of Commit Message Generation by Matching Online and Offline Settings
Tsvetkov, Petr
Eliseeva, Aleksandra
Dig, Danny
Bezzubov, Alexander
Golubev, Yaroslav
Bryksin, Timofey
Zharov, Yaroslav
Software Engineering
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
When a Commit Message Generation (CMG) system is integrated into the IDEs and other products at JetBrains, we perform online evaluation based on user acceptance of the generated messages. However, performing online experiments with every change to a CMG system is troublesome, as each iteration affects users and requires time to collect enough statistics. On the other hand, offline evaluation, a prevalent approach in the research literature, facilitates fast experiments but employs automatic metrics that are not guaranteed to represent the preferences of real users. In this work, we describe a novel way we employed to deal with this problem at JetBrains, by leveraging an online metric - the number of edits users introduce before committing the generated messages to the VCS - to select metrics for offline experiments. To support this new type of evaluation, we develop a novel markup collection tool mimicking the real workflow with a CMG system, collect a dataset with 57 pairs consisting of commit messages generated by GPT-4 and their counterparts edited by human experts, and design and verify a way to synthetically extend such a dataset. Then, we use the final dataset of 656 pairs to study how the widely used similarity metrics correlate with the online metric reflecting the real users' experience. Our results indicate that edit distance exhibits the highest correlation with the online metric, whereas commonly used similarity metrics such as BLEU and METEOR demonstrate low correlation. This contradicts the previous studies on similarity metrics for CMG, suggesting that user interactions with a CMG system in real-world settings differ significantly from the responses by human labelers within controlled environments. We release all the code and the dataset to support future research in the field: https://jb.gg/cmg-evaluation.
title Towards Realistic Evaluation of Commit Message Generation by Matching Online and Offline Settings
topic Software Engineering
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12046