Code Comprehension: Review and Large Language Models Exploration

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of code comprehension, a crucial aspect of Software Engineering that encompasses the process by which developers understand code. Our study categorizes code comprehension research into four areas: code comment generation, the correlation of EEG signals with code comprehension, experimental studies on code comprehension, and code visualization, detailing methodologies within each. Further, we investigate the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in enhancing code comprehension tasks, highlighting the potential future research opportunities. This research aims to provide software engineers and researchers with a comprehensive understanding of the current technologies for code comprehension and to point out possible directions for future research.