Generating Query-Specific Class API Summaries

Source code summaries are concise representations, in form of text and/or code, of complex code elements and are meant to help developers gain a quick understanding that in turns help them perform specific tasks. Generation of summaries that are task-specific is still a challenge in the automatic code summarization field. We propose an approach for generating on-demand, extrinsic hybrid summaries for API classes, relevant to a programming task, formulated as a natural language query. The summaries include the most relevant sentences extracted from the API reference documentation and the most relevant methods. External evaluators assessed the summaries generated for classes retrieved from JDK and Android libraries for several programming tasks. The majority found that the summaries are complete, concise, and readable. A comparison with summaries produce by three baseline approaches revealed that the information present only in our summaries is more relevant than the one present only in the baselines summaries. Finally, an extrinsic evaluation study showed that the summaries help the users evaluating the correctness of API retrieval results, faster and more accurately.