A Novel Approach for Clone Group Mapping by using Topic Modeling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new clone group mapping method using topic modeling that effectively handles different clone types by transforming high-dimensional code data into a low-dimensional topic space, achieving high accuracy.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel clone group mapping approach leveraging topic modeling to improve accuracy across clone types, including Type-1, Type-2, and Type-3.

Findings

Recall and precision up to 0.99 on four open source projects

Effective for Type-1, Type-2, and Type-3 clones

Transforms high-dimensional code data into low-dimensional topic space

Abstract

Clone group mapping has a very important significance in the evolution of code clone. The topic modeling techniques were applied into code clone firstly and a new clone group mapping method was proposed. The method is very effective for not only Type-1 and Type-2 clone but also Type-3 clone .By making full use of the source text and structure information, topic modeling techniques transform the mapping problem of high-dimensional code space into a low-dimensional topic space, the goal of clone group mapping was indirectly reached by mapping clone group topics. Experiments on four open source software show that the recall and precision are up to 0.99, thus the method can effectively and accurately reach the goal of clone group mapping.