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Impact of Evaluation Methodologies on Code Summarization

Pengyu Nie, Jiyang Zhang, Junyi Jessy Li, Ray Mooney, Milos Gligoric


Abstract
There has been a growing interest in developing machine learning (ML) models for code summarization tasks, e.g., comment generation and method naming. Despite substantial increase in the effectiveness of ML models, the evaluation methodologies, i.e., the way people split datasets into training, validation, and test sets, were not well studied. Specifically, no prior work on code summarization considered the timestamps of code and comments during evaluation. This may lead to evaluations that are inconsistent with the intended use cases. In this paper, we introduce the time-segmented evaluation methodology, which is novel to the code summarization research community, and compare it with the mixed-project and cross-project methodologies that have been commonly used. Each methodology can be mapped to some use cases, and the time-segmented methodology should be adopted in the evaluation of ML models for code summarization. To assess the impact of methodologies, we collect a dataset of (code, comment) pairs with timestamps to train and evaluate several recent ML models for code summarization. Our experiments show that different methodologies lead to conflicting evaluation results. We invite the community to expand the set of methodologies used in evaluations.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.339
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4936–4960
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.339
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.339
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pengyu Nie, Jiyang Zhang, Junyi Jessy Li, Ray Mooney, and Milos Gligoric. 2022. Impact of Evaluation Methodologies on Code Summarization. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4936–4960, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Impact of Evaluation Methodologies on Code Summarization (Nie et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.339.pdf
Code
 engineeringsoftware/time-segmented-evaluation