# Icing on the Cake: Automatic Code Summarization at Ericsson

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09735 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09735/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08155/) (2020)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00859/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05782/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10620/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Software Engineering: Survey and Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03533/) (2023)
- [code2seq: Generating Sequences from Structured Representations of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01400/) (2018)
- [Few-shot training LLMs for project-specific code-summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04237/) (2022)
- [Automatic Semantic Augmentation of Language Model Prompts (for Code Summarization)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06815/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Few-Shot Summarizers: Multi-Intent Comment Generation via In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11384/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study on Usage and Perceptions of LLMs in a Software Engineering Project](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16186/) (2024)
- [On the Reliability and Explainability of Language Models for Program Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09587/) (2023)
- [Rewriting the Code: A Simple Method for Large Language Model Augmented Code Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04514/) (2024)
- [Developer-Intent Driven Code Comment Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07055/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT: A Study on its Utility for Ubiquitous Software Engineering Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16837/) (2023)
- [A Prompt Learning Framework for Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16066/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Large Language Models (LLMs) for Source Code Analysis: applications, models and datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17502/) (2025)
- [Assertion-Aware Test Code Summarization with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06227/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents our findings on the automatic summarization of Java methods within Ericsson, a global telecommunications company. We evaluate the performance of an approach called Automatic Semantic Augmentation of Prompts (ASAP), which uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate leading summary comments for Java methods. ASAP enhances the LLM's prompt context by integrating static program analysis and information retrieval techniques to identify similar exemplar methods along with their developer-written Javadocs, and serves as the baseline in our study. In contrast, we explore and compare the performance of four simpler approaches that do not require static program analysis, information retrieval, or the presence of exemplars as in the ASAP method. Our methods rely solely on the Java method body as input, making them lightweight and more suitable for rapid deployment in commercial software development environments. We conducted experiments on an Ericsson software project and replicated the study using two widely-used open-source Java projects, Guava and Elasticsearch, to ensure the reliability of our results. Performance was measured across eight metrics that capture various aspects of similarity. Notably, one of our simpler approaches performed as well as or better than the ASAP method on both the Ericsson project and the open-source projects. Additionally, we performed an ablation study to examine the impact of method names on Javadoc summary generation across our four proposed approaches and the ASAP method. By masking the method names and observing the generated summaries, we found that our approaches were statistically significantly less influenced by the absence of method names compared to the baseline. This suggests that our methods are more robust to variations in method names and may derive summaries more comprehensively from the method body than the ASAP approach.