Generative transformation via abstract change script

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Yang, Yangrui

Affiliations: College of Information Engineering, North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power, Zhengzhou, Henan, China | E-mail: yangyangrui@ncwu.edu.cn

Abstract: With the popularity of code search, it is an important problem how to make the retrieved source code change automatically based on the user needs. However, none of the existing code transformation methods could solve this problem. They either fix compile bugs or depend on the formal specifications which lack the practicality. In this paper, we propose a novel generative transformation based on code change: we generate the abstract change script from code changes and apply the script to transform the retrieved source code. To evaluate our method, we extract 7 topics and collect 5–6 code snippets per topic from Github, and perform 5 different experiments in which we even explore 2 sensitivity-related rules and use the rules for raising the accuracy gradually. The experimental results show that our method is feasible and practical with 73.84% accuracy.

Keywords: Code reuse, code search, program transformation, code change, change script

DOI: 10.3233/KES-180391

Journal: International Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 277-286, 2018