# Automatic Generation of Text Descriptive Comments for Code Blocks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10620/) (2023)
- [Retrieval Augmented Code Generation and Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11601/) (2021)
- [Natural Language Generation and Understanding of Big Code for AI-Assisted Programming: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02503/) (2023)
- [Learning Deep Semantics for Test Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10166/) (2023)
- [Distilled GPT for Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14731/) (2023)
- [Code Structure Guided Transformer for Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09340/) (2021)
- [Project-Level Encoding for Neural Source Code Summarization of Subroutines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11599/) (2021)
- [Source Code Summarization with Structural Relative Position Guided Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06521/) (2022)
- [Impact of Evaluation Methodologies on Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09619/) (2021)
- [Diverse and Specific Clarification Question Generation with Keywords](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10317/) (2021)
- [Tram: A Token-level Retrieval-augmented Mechanism for Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11074/) (2023)
- [Exploring Large Language Models for Code Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16673/) (2023)
- [Learning to Generate Code Comments from Class Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13426/) (2021)
- [Malicious Source Code Detection Using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07957/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Natural Language Processing for Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05773/) (2022)
- [Revisiting File Context for Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02326/) (2023)
- [Statement-based Memory for Neural Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11709/) (2023)
- [LAMNER: Code Comment Generation Using Character Language Model and Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09654/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a framework to automatically generate descriptive comments for source code blocks. While this problem has been studied by many researchers previously, their methods are mostly based on fixed template and achieves poor results. Our framework does not rely on any template, but makes use of a new recursive neural network called Code-RNN to extract features from the source code and embed them into one vector. When this vector representation is input to a new recurrent neural network (Code-GRU), the overall framework generates text descriptions of the code with accuracy (Rouge-2 value) significantly higher than other learning-based approaches such as sequence-to-sequence model. The Code-RNN model can also be used in other scenario where the representation of code is required.