Label Smoothing Improves Neural Source Code Summarization

Label smoothing is a regularization technique for neural networks. Normally neural models are trained to an output distribution that is a vector with a single 1 for the correct prediction, and 0 for all other elements. Label smoothing converts the correct prediction location to something slightly less than 1, then distributes the remainder to the other elements such that they are slightly greater than 0. A conceptual explanation behind label smoothing is that it helps prevent a neural model from becoming "overconfident" by forcing it to consider alternatives, even if only slightly. Label smoothing has been shown to help several areas of language generation, yet typically requires considerable tuning and testing to achieve the optimal results. This tuning and testing has not been reported for neural source code summarization – a growing research area in software engineering that seeks to generate natural language descriptions of source code behavior. In this paper, we demonstrate the effect of label smoothing on several baselines in neural code summarization, and conduct an experiment to find good parameters for label smoothing and make recommendations for its use.