Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2022

Abstract

Pull Requests (PRs) are a mechanism on modern collaborative coding platforms, such as GitHub. PRs allow developers to tell others that their code changes are available for merging into another branch in a repository. A PR needs to be reviewed and approved by the core team of the repository before the changes are merged into the branch. Usually, reviewers need to identify a PR that is in line with their interests before providing a review. By default, PRs are arranged in a list view that shows the titles of PRs. Therefore, it is desirable to have a precise and concise title, which is beneficial for both reviewers and other developers. However, it is often the case that developers do not provide good titles; we find that many existing PR titles are either inappropriate in length (i.e., too short or too long) or fail to convey useful information, which may result in PR being ignored or rejected. Therefore, there is a need for automatic techniques to help developers draft high-quality titles. In this paper, we introduce the task of automatic generation of PR titles. We formulate the task as a one-sentence summarization task. To facilitate the research on this task, we construct a dataset that consists of 43,816 PRs from 495 GitHub repositories. We evaluated the state-of-the-art summarization approaches for the automatic PR title generation task. We leverage ROUGE metrics to automatically evaluate the summarization approaches and conduct a manual evaluation. The experimental results indicate that BART is the best technique for generating satisfactory PR titles with ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L F1-scores of 47.22, 25.27, and 43.12, respectively. The manual evaluation also shows that the titles generated by BART are preferred.

Keywords

Summarization, GitHub, Pull-Request, Mining, Software Repositories

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Limassol, Cyprus, October 2-7

First Page

71

Last Page

81

ISBN

9781665479561

Identifier

10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00015

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00015

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