{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,13]],"date-time":"2026-04-13T23:15:59Z","timestamp":1776122159799,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":114,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,2,25]],"date-time":"2022-02-25T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1645747200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["61802435"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61802435"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Symmetry"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Source code summarization refers to the natural language description of the source code\u2019s function. It can help developers easily understand the semantics of the source code. We can think of the source code and the corresponding summarization as being symmetric. However, the existing source code summarization is mismatched with the source code, missing, or out of date. Manual source code summarization is inefficient and requires a lot of human efforts. To overcome such situations, many studies have been conducted on Automatic Source Code Summarization (ASCS). Given a set of source code, the ASCS techniques can automatically generate a summary described with natural language. In this paper, we give a review of the development of ASCS technology. Almost all ASCS technology involves the following stages: source code modeling, code summarization generation, and quality evaluation. We further categorize the existing ASCS techniques based on the above stages and analyze their advantages and shortcomings. We also draw a clear map on the development of the existing algorithms.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/sym14030471","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,2,27]],"date-time":"2022-02-27T20:49:03Z","timestamp":1645994943000},"page":"471","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":54,"title":["A Survey of Automatic Source Code Summarization"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"14","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8871-4272","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Chunyan","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zhengzhou 450001, China"}]},{"given":"Junchao","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zhengzhou 450001, China"}]},{"given":"Qinglei","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Engineering, ZhengZhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, China"}]},{"given":"Ting","family":"Xu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Engineering, ZhengZhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, China"}]},{"given":"Ke","family":"Tang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zhengzhou 450001, China"}]},{"given":"Hairen","family":"Gui","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zhengzhou 450001, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8387-0831","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Fudong","family":"Liu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zhengzhou 450001, China"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,2,25]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Steidl, D., Hummel, B., and Juergens, E. 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