Evaluating Distance Measures for Program Repair
Charles Koutcheme, Sami Sarsa, Juho Leinonen, Lassi Haaranen, Arto Hellas · 2023
Background and Context: Struggling with programming assignments while learning to program is a common phenomenon in programming courses around the world. Supporting struggling students is a common theme in Computing Education Research (CER), where a wide variety of support methods have been created and evaluated. An important stream of research here focuses on program repair, where methods for automatically fixing erroneous code are used for supporting students as they debug their code. Work in this area has so far assessed the performance of the methods by evaluating the closeness of the proposed fixes to the original erroneous code. The evaluations have mainly relied on the use of edit distance measures such as the sequence edit distance and there is a lack of research on which distance measure is the most appropriate.