CodeExp: Explanatory Code Document Generation

Haotian Cui, Chenglong Wang, Junjie Huang, Jeevana Priya Inala, Todd Mytkowicz, Bo Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Nan Duan


Abstract
Developing models that can automatically generate detailed code explanation can greatly benefit software maintenance and programming education. However, existing code-to-text generation models often produce only high-level summaries of code that do not capture implementation-level choices essential for these scenarios. To fill in this gap, we propose the code explanation generation task. We first conducted a human study to identify the criteria for high-quality explanatory docstring for code. Based on that, we collected and refined a large-scale code docstring corpus and formulated automatic evaluation metrics that best match human assessments. Finally, we present a multi-stage fine-tuning strategy and baseline models for the task. Our experiments show that (1) our refined training dataset lets models achieve better performance in the explanation generation tasks compared to larger-scale unrefined data (15x larger), and (2) fine-tuned models can generate well-structured long docstrings comparable to human-written ones. We envision our training dataset, human-evaluation protocol, recommended metrics, and fine-tuning strategy can boost future code explanation research. The code and annotated data are available at https://github.com/subercui/CodeExp.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.174
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2342–2354
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.174
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haotian Cui, Chenglong Wang, Junjie Huang, Jeevana Priya Inala, Todd Mytkowicz, Bo Wang, Jianfeng Gao, and Nan Duan. 2022. CodeExp: Explanatory Code Document Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 2342–2354, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CodeExp: Explanatory Code Document Generation (Cui et al., Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.findings-emnlp.174.pdf