Automated program understanding by concept recognition

摘要

Program understanding can be seen as the process of understanding abstract concepts in the program code. Thus, automated recognition of abstract concepts may greatly assist the human understanding process. This paper describes an approach to automated concept recognition and its implementation. In the approach, we use a concept model and a library of concept recognition rules to describe what the concepts are and how to recognize them from lower-level concepts. Programming language knowledge as well as domain knowledge are used to aid the recognition of abstract concepts.