ASKDetector: An AST-Semantic and Key Features Fusion based Code Comment Mismatch Detector

Code comments are essential for programming comprehension. Nevertheless, developers often neglect to update comments after modifying the source code. Wrong code comments may lead to bugs in the maintenance process, thus affecting the reliability of the software. So, timely comment mismatch detection is crucial for software development and maintenance. However, existing works have the following two limitations: 1) the lack of use of code structural and sequential information, and 2) the ignorance of existing associations between code and comments. In this paper, we propose a new model called ASKDetector (AST-Semantic and Key features fusion based mismatch Detector). For the first limitation, we encode code with an attention-based preorder traversal abstract syntax tree sequence to obtain both order and structural information. And CodeBERT is utilized to capture contextual semantic features further. For the second one, we encode extracted association information between the code snippets and comments to reduce the semantic gap. The correlations between the encoders are learned through a fusion layer and a multi-layer perceptron. The experimental results prove that our detector outperforms the state-of-the-art model in evaluation metrics, where our F1 and accuracy exceed an average of 3.4%. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering $\rightarrow$ Software reliability; • Social and professional topics $\rightarrow$ Software maintenance.