RepliComment: Identifying Clones in Code Comments

Code comments are the primary means to document implementation and ease program comprehension. Thus, their quality should be a primary concern to improve program maintenance. While a lot of effort has been dedicated to detect bad smell in code, little work focuses on comments. In this paper we start working in this direction by detecting clones in comments. Our initial investigation shows that even well known projects have several comment clones, and just as clones are bad smell in code, they may be for comments. A manual analysis of the clones we identified revealed several issues in real Java projects.