Investigating Novice Developers’ Code Commenting Trends Using Machine Learning Techniques

Code comments are considered an efficient way to document the functionality of a particular block of code. Code commenting is a common practice among developers to explain the purpose of the code in order to improve code comprehension and readability. Researchers investigated the effect of code comments on software development tasks and demonstrated the use of comments in several ways, including maintenance, reusability, bug detection, etc. Given the importance of code comments, it becomes vital for novice developers to brush up on their code commenting skills. In this study, we initially investigated what types of comments novice students document in their source code and further categorized those comments using a machine learning approach. The work involves the initial manual classification of code comments and then building a machine learning model to classify student code comments automatically. The findings of our study revealed that novice developers/students’ comments are mainly related to Literal (26.66%) and Insufficient (26.66%). Further, we proposed and extended the taxonomy of such source code comments by adding a few more categories, i.e., License (5.18%), Profile (4.80%), Irrelevant (4.80%), Commented Code (4.44%), Autogenerated (1.48%), and Improper (1.10%). Moreover, we assessed our approach with three different machine-learning classifiers. Our implementation of machine learning models found that Decision Tree resulted in the overall highest accuracy, i.e., 85%. This study helps in predicting the type of code comments for a novice developer using a machine learning approach that can be implemented to generate automated feedback for students, thus saving teachers time for manual one-on-one feedback, which is a time-consuming activity

A Novel Personalized Learning Framework With Interactive e-Mentoring

E-learning has established itself as a new alternative to conventional learning styles to accomplish the goal of education and learning for everyone. The classroom learning style is based on a “one size fits all” approach because, in a typical classroom environment, an instructor has to deal with several students at the same time. A similar problem goes along with the traditional learning management systems in which every student must learn the course devised by the instructor, within a specific timeline and achieve specific objectives, despite students’ preferences and capabilities. The recent global pandemic has pushed educational institutes worldwide to recourse to an “online-only” mode of education and teaching delivery which has raised many challenges that need to be addressed. The existing e-learning systems fail to fulfill the expectations of a learner or an instructor in certain ways including the style of content delivery, mode of teaching, an adaptation of learner style that doesn’t match with the teaching style, the content type, and above all the e-learning lacks to provide the e-mentoring capability to deal with the challenges a learner and an instructor’s face during the learning process. This research aims to develop personalized learning by incorporating an intelligent e-mentor. The proposed e-mentor-based learning model is capable of customizing a course for individuals by automatically adapting it to their unique learning styles, preferences, abilities, existing knowledge, and expectations from the course. The outcome of the proposed model shows that e-mentoring not only increased learner satisfaction but also enhanced the learning process making it a preferred choice

Towards the Modelling of Veillance based Citizen Profiling using Knowledge Graphs

In this work we have proposed a model for Citizen Profiling. It uses veillance (Surveillance and Sousveillance) for data acquisition. For representation of Citizen Profile Temporal Knowledge Graph has been used through which we can answer semantic queries. Previously, most of the work lacks representation of Citizen Profile and have used surveillance for data acquisition. Our contribution is towards enriching the data acquisition process by adding sousveillance mechanism and facilitating semantic queries through representation of Citizen Profiles using Temporal Knowledge Graphs. Our proposed solution is storage efficient as we have only stored data logs for Citizen Profiling instead of storing images, audio, and video for profiling purposes. Our proposed system can be extended to Smart City, Smart Traffic Management, Workplace profiling etc. Agent based mechanism can be used for data acquisition where each Citizen has its own agent. Another improvement can be to incorporate a decentralized version of database for maintaining Citizen profile

Investigating Novice Developers’ Code Commenting Trends Using Machine Learning Techniques

Code comments are considered an efficient way to document the functionality of a particular block of code. Code commenting is a common practice among developers to explain the purpose of the code in order to improve code comprehension and readability. Researchers investigated the effect of code comments on software development tasks and demonstrated the use of comments in several ways, including maintenance, reusability, bug detection, etc. Given the importance of code comments, it becomes vital for novice developers to brush up on their code commenting skills. In this study, we initially investigated what types of comments novice students document in their source code and further categorized those comments using a machine learning approach. The work involves the initial manual classification of code comments and then building a machine learning model to classify student code comments automatically. The findings of our study revealed that novice developers/students’ comments are mainly related to Literal (26.66%) and Insufficient (26.66%). Further, we proposed and extended the taxonomy of such source code comments by adding a few more categories, i.e., License (5.18%), Profile (4.80%), Irrelevant (4.80%), Commented Code (4.44%), Autogenerated (1.48%), and Improper (1.10%). Moreover, we assessed our approach with three different machine-learning classifiers. Our implementation of machine learning models found that Decision Tree resulted in the overall highest accuracy, i.e., 85%. This study helps in predicting the type of code comments for a novice developer using a machine learning approach that can be implemented to generate automated feedback for students, thus saving teachers time for manual one-on-one feedback, which is a time-consuming activity.peerReviewe

Financial Knowledge Graph Based Financial Report Query System

Annual Financial Reports are the core in the Banking Sector to publish its financial statistics. Extracting useful information from these complex and lengthy reports involves manual process to resolve the financial queries, resulting in delays and ambiguity in investment decisions. One of the major reasons is the lack of any standardization in the format and vocabulary used in the reports. An automated system for resolution of intelligent financial queries is therefore difficult to design. Several works have been proposed to overcome these problems using Information Extraction; however, they do not address the semantic interoperability of the reports across different institutions. This work proposed an automated querying engine to answer the financial queries using Ontology based Information Extraction. For Semantic modeling of financial reports, a Financial Knowledge Graph, assisted by Financial Ontology, has been proposed. The nodes are populated with entities, while links are populated with relationships using Information Extraction applied on annual reports. Two benefits have been provided by this system to stakeholders through automation: decision making through queries and generation of custom financial stories. The work can further be extended to other domains including healthcare and academia where physical reports are used for communication