Advances in Code Summarization

Several studies have suggested that comments describing source code can help mitigate the burden of program understanding. However, software systems usually lack adequate comments and sometime even when present, they may be outdated. Researchers have addressed this issue by automatically generating comments from source code, a task referred to as Code Summarization. In this technical presentation, we take a deeper look at some of the significant, recent works in the area of code summarization and how each of them attempts to take a new perspective of this task including methods leveraging RNNs, Transformers, Graph neural networks and Reinforcement learning. We review individual methods in detail and discuss future avenues for this task.