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International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

FASE 2022: Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering pp 288–309Cite as

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Semantic Clone Detection via Probabilistic Software Modeling

Semantic Clone Detection via Probabilistic Software Modeling

  • Hannes Thaller  ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3810-047510,
  • Lukas Linsbauer11 &
  • Alexander Egyed10 
  • Conference paper
  • Open Access
  • First Online: 29 March 2022

  • 2371 Accesses

  • 1 Altmetric

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS,volume 13241)

Abstract

Semantic clone detection is the process of finding program elements with similar or equal runtime behavior. For example, detecting the semantic equality between the recursive and iterative implementation of the factorial computation. Semantic clone detection is the de facto technical boundary of clone detectors. In recent years, this boundary has been tested using interesting new approaches. This article contributes a semantic clone detection approach that detects clones which have 0 % syntactic similarity. We present Semantic Clone Detection via Probabilistic Software Modeling (SCD-PSM) as a stable and precise solution to semantic clone detection. PSM builds a probabilistic model of a program that is capable of evaluating and generating runtime data. SCD-PSM leverages this model and its model elements for finding behaviorally equal model elements. This behavioral equality is then generalized to semantic equality of the original program elements. It uses the likelihood between model elements as a distance metric. Then, it employs the likelihood ratio significance test to decide whether this distance is significant, given a pre-specified and controllable false-positive rate. The output of SCD-PSM are pairs of program elements (i.e., methods), their distance, and a decision on whether they are clones or not. SCD-PSM yields excellent results with a Matthews Correlation Coefficient greater than 0.9. These results are obtained on classical semantic clone detection problems such as detecting recursive and iterative versions of an algorithm, but also on complex problems used in coding competitions.

Keywords

  • semantic clone detection
  • probabilistic software modeling
  • clone detection

The research reported in this paper has been supported by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy, and the Province of Upper Austria in the frame of the COMET center SCCH. This research was funded in part, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [P25513].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria

    Hannes Thaller & Alexander Egyed

  2. Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Lukas Linsbauer

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  1. Hannes Thaller
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Correspondence to Hannes Thaller .

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  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Prof. Einar Broch Johnsen

  2. Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Linz, Austria

    Prof. Manuel Wimmer

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Thaller, H., Linsbauer, L., Egyed, A. (2022). Semantic Clone Detection via Probabilistic Software Modeling. In: Johnsen, E.B., Wimmer, M. (eds) Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering. FASE 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13241. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99429-7_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99429-7_16

  • Published: 29 March 2022

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