Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 312

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 45 of the 45 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Improved Code Summarization via a Graph Neural Network

Open access
LeClair, Alexander, Haque, Sakib, Wu, Lingfei, McMillan, Collin·2020·Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension

Abstract

Automatic source code summarization is the task of generating natural language descriptions for source code. Automatic code summarization is a rapidly expanding research area, especially as the community has taken greater advantage of advances in neural network and AI technologies. In general, source code summarization techniques use the source code as input and outputs a natural language description. Yet a strong consensus is developing that using structural information as input leads to improved performance. The first approaches to use structural information flattened the AST into a sequence. Recently, more complex approaches based on random AST paths or graph neural networks have improved on the models using flattened ASTs. However, the literature still does not describe the using a graph neural network together with source code sequence as separate inputs to a model. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach that uses a graph-based neural architecture that better matches the default structure of the AST to generate these summaries. We evaluate our technique using a data set of 2.1 million Java method-comment pairs and show improvement over four baseline techniques, two from the software engineering literature, and two from machine learning literature.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3387904.3389268

Cites

45 of 45 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

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

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 45 references

Cited by

See all 312

Metadata

Authors
LeClair, A., Haque, S., Wu, L., & McMillan, C.
Venue
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension
Publisher
ACM
Published
2020-07-13
Pages
184-195
OpenAlex
W3014173464
Cited by
312
References
45
FWCI
41.47
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Improved Code Summarization via a Graph Neural Network. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/3387904.3389268
The paper
LeClair, A., Haque, S., Wu, L., & McMillan, C. (2020). Improved Code Summarization via a Graph Neural Network. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension. https://doi.org/10.1145/3387904.3389268

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.