Detecting Essence Code Clones via Information Theoretic Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces ECScan, an information-theoretic tool that effectively detects essence code clones by focusing on semantic core logic, outperforming existing methods in real-world software projects.

Contribution

The paper presents ECScan, a novel clone detection approach that emphasizes semantic importance using information theory, addressing limitations of syntactic-based techniques.

Findings

ECScan achieves an average F1-score of 85% in detecting essence clones.

ECScan outperforms existing clone detection tools across various clone types.

The approach demonstrates high scalability and robustness in real-world projects.

Abstract

Code cloning, a widespread practice in software development, involves replicating code fragments to save time but often at the expense of software maintainability and quality. In this paper, we address the specific challenge of detecting "essence clones", a complex subtype of Type-3 clones characterized by sharing critical logic despite different peripheral codes. Traditional techniques often fail to detect essence clones due to their syntactic focus. To overcome this limitation, we introduce ECScan, a novel detection tool that leverages information theory to assess the semantic importance of code lines. By assigning weights to each line based on its information content, ECScan emphasizes core logic over peripheral code differences. Our comprehensive evaluation across various real-world projects shows that ECScan significantly outperforms existing tools in detecting essence clones, achieving an average F1-score of 85%. It demonstrates robust performance across all clone types and offers exceptional scalability. This study advances clone detection by providing a practical tool for developers to enhance code quality and reduce maintenance burdens, emphasizing the semantic aspects of code through an innovative information-theoretic approach.