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Source Code Clone Search

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Code Clone Analysis

Abstract

Identifying similarities in source code is the main challenge for reuse, plagiarism, and code clone detection. Code clone search has emerged as a new research branch in clone detection, aiming to provide similarity search functionality for code snippets. While clone search shares its fundamentals with clone detection, both its objective and requirements differ significantly. Clone search focuses on search engines that are designed to find clones of a single input code snippet (i.e., query) from a large set of code snippets (i.e., corpus). Scalability, short response time, and the ability to rank result sets among the major challenges have to be dealt with by a clone search engine. In this chapter, we identify and define major concepts related to clone search. We then present a framework that summarizes the architecture of a clone search engine and enables us to provide a systematic view of the internals of such an engine. Finally, we discuss how to benchmark and evaluate the performance of clone search engines. The discussion includes a set of measures that are helpful in evaluating clone search engines.

Iman Keivanloo—this work was done prior to joining Amazon.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amazon, Seattle, USA

    Iman Keivanloo

  2. Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

    Juergen Rilling

Authors
  1. Iman Keivanloo
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  2. Juergen Rilling
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Correspondence to Iman Keivanloo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka, Japan

    Katsuro Inoue

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

    Chanchal K. Roy

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Keivanloo, I., Rilling, J. (2021). Source Code Clone Search. In: Inoue, K., Roy, C.K. (eds) Code Clone Analysis. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1927-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1927-4_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-16-1926-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-16-1927-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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