CodeSum: Translate Program Language to Natural Language

Abstract: During software maintenance, programmers spend a lot of time on code comprehension. Reading comments is an effective way for programmers to reduce the reading and navigating time when comprehending source code. Therefore, as a critical task in software engineering, code summarization aims to generate brief natural language descriptions for source code. In this paper, we propose a new code summarization model named CodeSum. CodeSum exploits the attention-based sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) neural network with Structure-based Traversal (SBT) of Abstract Syntax Trees (AST). The AST sequences generated by SBT can better present the structure of ASTs and keep unambiguous. We conduct experiments on three large-scale corpora in different program languages, i.e., Java, C#, and SQL, in which Java corpus is our new proposed industry code extracted from Github. Experimental results show that our method CodeSum outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly.