Paper ID: 2205.15479

HierarchyNet: Learning to Summarize Source Code with Heterogeneous Representations

Minh Huynh Nguyen, Nghi D. Q. Bui, Truong Son Hy, Long Tran-Thanh, Tien N. Nguyen

We propose a novel method for code summarization utilizing Heterogeneous Code Representations (HCRs) and our specially designed HierarchyNet. HCRs effectively capture essential code features at lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels by abstracting coarse-grained code elements and incorporating fine-grained program elements in a hierarchical structure. Our HierarchyNet method processes each layer of the HCR separately through a unique combination of the Heterogeneous Graph Transformer, a Tree-based CNN, and a Transformer Encoder. This approach preserves dependencies between code elements and captures relations through a novel Hierarchical-Aware Cross Attention layer. Our method surpasses current state-of-the-art techniques, such as PA-Former, CAST, and NeuralCodeSum.

Submitted: May 31, 2022