Code Structure–Guided Transformer for Source Code Summarization

• Published in: ACM transactions on software engineering and methodology 2023-02, Vol.32 (1), p.1-32, Article 23
• Main Authors: Gao, Shuzheng, Gao, Cuiyun, He, Yulan, Zeng, Jichuan, Nie, Lunyiu, Xia, Xin, Lyu, Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Software and its engineering; Software creation and management; Software development techniques
• ISSN: 1049-331X; 1557-7392
• DOI: 10.1145/3522674

Code summaries help developers comprehend programs and reduce their time to infer the program functionalities during software maintenance. Recent efforts resort to deep learning techniques such as sequence-to-sequence models for generating accurate code summaries, among which Transformer-based approaches have achieved promising performance. However, effectively integrating the code structure information into the Transformer is under-explored in this task domain. In this article, we propose a novel approach named SG-Trans to incorporate code structural properties into Transformer. Specifically, we inject the local symbolic information (e.g., code tokens and statements) and global syntactic structure (e.g., dataflow graph) into the self-attention module of Transformer as inductive bias. To further capture the hierarchical characteristics of code, the local information and global structure are designed to distribute in the attention heads of lower layers and high layers of Transformer. Extensive evaluation shows the superior performance of SG-Trans over the state-of-the-art approaches. Compared with the best-performing baseline, SG-Trans still improves 1.4% and 2.0% on two benchmark datasets, respectively, in terms of METEOR score, a metric widely used for measuring generation quality.