@inproceedings{bhattacharya-gupta-2025-selective,
    title = "Selective Shot Learning for Code Explanation",
    author = "Bhattacharya, Paheli  and
      Gupta, Rishabh",
    editor = "Arviv, Ofir  and
      Clinciu, Miruna  and
      Dhole, Kaustubh  and
      Dror, Rotem  and
      Gehrmann, Sebastian  and
      Habba, Eliya  and
      Itzhak, Itay  and
      Mille, Simon  and
      Perlitz, Yotam  and
      Santus, Enrico  and
      Sedoc, Jo{\~a}o  and
      Shmueli Scheuer, Michal  and
      Stanovsky, Gabriel  and
      Tafjord, Oyvind",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM{\texttwosuperior})",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria and virtual meeting",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/metadata-correction-jian-chen-ub/2025.gem-1.12/",
    pages = "151--160",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-261-9",
    abstract = "Code explanation plays a crucial role in the software engineering domain, aiding developers in grasping code functionality efficiently. Recent work shows that the performance of LLMs for code explanation improves in a few-shot setting, especially when the few-shot examples are selected intelligently. State-of-the-art approaches for such Selective Shot Learning (SSL) include token-based and embedding-based methods. However, these SSL approaches have been evaluated on proprietary LLMs, without much exploration on open-source Code-LLMs. Additionally, these methods lack consideration for programming language syntax. To bridge these gaps, we present a comparative study and propose a novel SSL method (SSL{\_}ner) that utilizes entity information for few-shot example selection. We present several insights and show the effectiveness of SSL{\_}ner approach over state-of-the-art methods across two datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic benchmarking of various few-shot examples selection approaches using open-source Code-LLMs for the code explanation task."
}