An Enhanced Data Augmentation Approach to Support Multi-Class Code Readability Classification
Qing Sheng Mi, Yiqun Hao, Maran Wu, Liwei Ou · Proceedings/Proceedings of the ... International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2022
Context: Code readability plays a critical role in software maintenance and evolvement, where a metric for classifying code readability levels is both applicable and desired.However, most prior research has treated code readability classification as a binary classification task due to the lack of labeled data.Objective: To support the training of multi-class code readability classification models, we propose an enhanced data augmentation approach.Method: The approach includes the use of domainspecific data transformation and GAN-based data augmentation.By virtue of this augmentation approach, we could generate sufficient readability data and well train a multi-class code readability model.Result: A series of experiments are conducted to evaluate our augmentation approach.The experimental results show that a state-of-the-art multi-class code readability classification accuracy of 68.0% is reached with a significant improvement of 6.3% compared to only using the original data.Conclusion: As an innovative work of proposing multi-class code readability classification and an enhanced code readability data augmentation approach, our method is proved to be effective.