Context2Name: A Deep Learning-Based Approach to Infer Natural Variable Names from Usage Contexts
Rohan Bavishi, Michael Pradel, Koushik Sen. 2017
Most of the JavaScript code deployed in the wild has been minified, a process in which identifier names are replaced with short, arbitrary and meaningless names. Minified code occupies less space, but also makes the code extremely difficult to manually inspect and understand. This paper presents Context2Name, a deep learning-based technique that partially reverses the effect of minification by predicting natural identifier names for minified names. The core idea is to predict from the usage context of a variable a name that captures the meaning of the variable. The approach combines a lightweight, token-based static analysis with an auto-encoder neural network that summarizes usage contexts and a recurrent neural network that predict natural names for a given usage context. We evaluate Context2Name with a large corpus of real-world JavaScript code and show that it successfully predicts 60.4% of all minified identifiers. A comparison with the state-of-the-art tools JSNice and JSNaughty shows that our approach predicts 17% and 43% more names than the best existing approaches, while taking only 2.6 milliseconds to predict a name, on average.
Similar Work