Cited by 158Software Engineering ResearchSoftware Testing and Debugging TechniquesSoftware Engineering Techniques and Practices

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 84 of the 84 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 9 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Deep learning similarities from different representations of source code

Open access
Tufano, Michele, Watson, Cody, Bavota, Gabriele, Di Penta, Massimiliano, White, Martin, Poshyvanyk, Denys·2018·Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Abstract

Assessing the similarity between code components plays a pivotal role in a number of Software Engineering (SE) tasks, such as clone detection, impact analysis, refactoring, etc. Code similarity is generally measured by relying on manually defined or hand-crafted features, e.g., by analyzing the overlap among identifiers or comparing the Abstract Syntax Trees of two code components. These features represent a best guess at what SE researchers can utilize to exploit and reliably assess code similarity for a given task. Recent work has shown, when using a stream of identifiers to represent the code, that Deep Learning (DL) can effectively replace manual feature engineering for the task of clone detection. However, source code can be represented at different levels of abstraction: identifiers, Abstract Syntax Trees, Control Flow Graphs, and Bytecode. We conjecture that each code representation can provide a different, yet orthogonal view of the same code fragment, thus, enabling a more reliable detection of similarities in code. In this paper, we demonstrate how SE tasks can benefit from a DL-based approach, which can automatically learn code similarities from different representations.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3196398.3196431

Cites

84 of 84 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

55 Own result · 31 Own interpretation · 24 No basis given · 21 Own method · 5 No full text of the sources · 3 Sources not found

Show all 70 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 30
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 44
  • Borderline: one of the tests for a substantial claim is unclear. 1
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 1
69 of 69
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Deep learning models require a long time to train.

    “One of the drawbacks of DL-based models is their long training time.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Enumerators tend to have bytecode structures that are highly similar even when their constants differ.

    “Enumerators have a very similar bytecode structure even if containing different constants.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Recursive Autoencoders have previously been applied in multiple domains and with various input types, including natural language, source code, and images.

    “As a matter of fact, Recursive Autoencoders have been used in several contexts with different inputs such as natural language, source code, images.”
3 of 3

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

4 of 4

Citations

Cites

Show all 75 references

Research works printed but not linked: 9

  1. 2017. Online Appendix: https://sites.google.com/view/learningcodesimilarities , Source Code: https://github.com/micheletufano/AutoenCODE. ( 2017 ). 2017. Online Appendix: https://sites.google.com/view/learningcodesimilarities, Source Code: https://github.com/micheletufano/AutoenCODE. (2017).
  2. 10.5555/2486788.2486879 · DOI
  3. 10.5555/3060832.3060845 · DOI
  4. 10.5555/2337223.2337267 · DOI
  5. 10.5555/3015812.3016002 · DOI
  6. 10.5555/2486788.2486857 · DOI
  7. 10.5555/2662708.2662719 · DOI
  8. 10.1145/2491411.2491420 · DOI · Paper page
  9. 10.5555/3172077.3172312 · DOI

Cited by

Sorted by citations

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Metadata

Authors
Tufano, M., Watson, C., Bavota, G., Di Penta, M., White, M., & Poshyvanyk, D.
Affiliations
  • William & Mary (US)
  • Università della Svizzera italiana (CH)
  • University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
Venue
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Publisher
ACM
Published
2018-05-28
Pages
542-553
OpenAlex
W2883359218
Cited by
158
References
75
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 31 · 2021: 29 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 18 · 2018: 1
FWCI
13.34
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) (publishedVersion)
Funders
NSF (CCF-1525902)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
Keywords
code similarity, clone detection, source code representation, abstract syntax tree, control flow graph, bytecode, feature engineering

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