An Empirical Study of Code Simplification Methods in Code Intelligence Tasks
Zongwen Shen, Yuning Li, Jidong Ge, Xiang Chen, Chuanyi Li, LiGuo Huang, Bin Luo · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · 2025
In recent years, pre-trained language models have seen significant success in natural language processing and have been increasingly applied to code-related tasks. Code intelligence tasks have shown promising performance with the support of code pre-trained language models. Pre-processing code simplification methods have been introduced to prune code tokens from the model’s input while maintaining task effectiveness. These methods improve the efficiency of code intelligence tasks while reducing computational costs. Post-prediction code simplification methods provide explanations for code intelligence task outcomes, enhancing the reliability and interpretability of model predictions. However, comprehensive evaluations of these methods across diverse code pre-trained model architectures and code intelligence tasks are lacking. To assess the effectiveness of code simplification methods, we conduct an empirical study integrating these code simplification methods with various pre-trained code models across multiple code intelligence tasks. Our empirical findings suggest that developing task-specific code simplification methods would be beneficial. Then, we recommend leveraging post-prediction methods to summarize prior knowledge, which can pre-process code simplification strategies. Moreover, establishing more evaluation mechanisms for code simplification is crucial. Finally, we propose incorporating code simplification methods into the pre-training phase of code pre-trained models to enhance their program comprehension and code representation capabilities.