DocGen: Generating Detailed Parameter Docstrings in Python
This addresses documentation debt for developers using open-source software, though it is incremental as it builds on existing code summarization tools.
The paper tackles the problem of generating detailed parameter docstrings in Python to address documentation debt in open-source software, achieving superior results over existing methods as validated by both automatic metrics and human evaluation with 17 developers.
Documentation debt hinders the effective utilization of open-source software. Although code summarization tools have been helpful for developers, most would prefer a detailed account of each parameter in a function rather than a high-level summary. However, generating such a summary is too intricate for a single generative model to produce reliably due to the lack of high-quality training data. Thus, we propose a multi-step approach that combines multiple task-specific models, each adept at producing a specific section of a docstring. The combination of these models ensures the inclusion of each section in the final docstring. We compared the results from our approach with existing generative models using both automatic metrics and a human-centred evaluation with 17 participating developers, which proves the superiority of our approach over existing methods.