Semantic Source Code Segmentation using Small and Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Dahou, Abdelhalim, Scherp, Ansgar, Kurten, Sebastian, Mathiak, Brigitte, Chauhan, Madhu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866912478330355712
author Dahou, Abdelhalim
Scherp, Ansgar
Kurten, Sebastian
Mathiak, Brigitte
Chauhan, Madhu
author_facet Dahou, Abdelhalim
Scherp, Ansgar
Kurten, Sebastian
Mathiak, Brigitte
Chauhan, Madhu
contents Source code segmentation, dividing code into functionally coherent segments, is crucial for knowledge retrieval and maintenance in software development. While enabling efficient navigation and comprehension of large codebases, manual and syntactic analysis approaches have become impractical as repositories grow, especially for low-resource languages like R and their research domains (e.g., social sciences, psychology).This paper introduces an automated, domain-specific approach for research R code segmentation using Large and Small Language Models (LLMs/SLMs). It presents two novel approaches and a human-annotated dataset, StatCodeSeg. We explore two distinct approaches: line-by-line analysis with context and range-based segment determination. We experiment with LLMs and fine-tuned SLMs. To support the generalizability of our approaches, we also include experiments on Python code from the computer science domain.Our results show that context-based line-by-line analysis is superior over range-based segmentation.Using smaller language models like CodeBERT and an encoder-only version of CodeT5+ are better than their LLM counterparts. Most notably, these two best-performing models did not see R code during pre-training versus the LLMs but were only fine-tuned on 4,130 lines of manually annotated code.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_08992
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Semantic Source Code Segmentation using Small and Large Language Models
Dahou, Abdelhalim
Scherp, Ansgar
Kurten, Sebastian
Mathiak, Brigitte
Chauhan, Madhu
Software Engineering
Computation and Language
Programming Languages
Source code segmentation, dividing code into functionally coherent segments, is crucial for knowledge retrieval and maintenance in software development. While enabling efficient navigation and comprehension of large codebases, manual and syntactic analysis approaches have become impractical as repositories grow, especially for low-resource languages like R and their research domains (e.g., social sciences, psychology).This paper introduces an automated, domain-specific approach for research R code segmentation using Large and Small Language Models (LLMs/SLMs). It presents two novel approaches and a human-annotated dataset, StatCodeSeg. We explore two distinct approaches: line-by-line analysis with context and range-based segment determination. We experiment with LLMs and fine-tuned SLMs. To support the generalizability of our approaches, we also include experiments on Python code from the computer science domain.Our results show that context-based line-by-line analysis is superior over range-based segmentation.Using smaller language models like CodeBERT and an encoder-only version of CodeT5+ are better than their LLM counterparts. Most notably, these two best-performing models did not see R code during pre-training versus the LLMs but were only fine-tuned on 4,130 lines of manually annotated code.
title Semantic Source Code Segmentation using Small and Large Language Models
topic Software Engineering
Computation and Language
Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08992