TUNA: TUning Naturalness-Based Analysis

Abstract

Natural language processing techniques, in particular n-gram models, have been applied successfully to facilitate a number of software engineering tasks. However, in our related ICSME '18 paper, we have shown that the conclusions of a study can drastically change with respect to how the code is tokenized and how the used n-gram model is parameterized. These choices are thus of utmost importance, and one must carefully make them. To show this and allow the community to benefit from our work, we have developed TUNA (TUning Naturalness-based Analysis), a Java software artifact to perform naturalness-based analyses of source code. To the best of our knowledge, TUNA is the first open-source, end-to-end toolchain to carry out source code analyses based on naturalness.