A Naming Pattern Based Approach for Method Name Recommendation

Method names in software projects are significant for developers to understand the method functionality. Existing state-of-the-art automated approaches tend to explore tokens composing method names from method contexts. However, the method name is not a simple combination of tokens, as it is structured and contains many repetitive naming patterns (e.g. “get __”, “create __”). Through a large-scale empirical analysis on 15M methods from 14K real software projects developed with Java codes, we found repetitive naming patterns in method names. In addition, the names of two function-similar methods usually have the same naming pattern. Based on our empirical study, we propose a naming pattern-based approach for method name recommendation, named Nam-Pat. Specifically, for a target method, NamPat first retrieve the most similar method from the training data by estimating their body code similarity. Then, the name of the most similar method is used as the pattern guider to provide the naming pattern, and NamPat combines it with the context information of the target method to perform method name recommendation. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conducted experiments on 17M methods from a widely used Java dataset. Experimental results show that compared with Code2vec, Code2seq, MNire, and Cognac, NamPat improves the state-of-the-art approaches in precision (5.8%-27.1%), recall (11.1%-60.1 %), and F-score (8.5 %-43.9%), which proves the effectiveness of our proposed approach.