Characterising the Knowledge about Primitive Variables in Java Code Comments

Abstract

Primitive types are fundamental components available in any programming language, which serve as the building blocks of data manipulation. Understanding the role of these types in source code is essential to write software. Little work has been conducted on how often these variables are documented in code comments and what types of knowledge the comments provide about variables of primitive types. In this paper, we present an approach for detecting primitive variables and their description in comments using lexical matching and advanced matching. We evaluate our approaches by comparing the lexical and advanced matching performance in terms of recall, precision, and F-score, against 600 manua..