An inception architecture-based model for improving code readability classification

The process of classifying a piece of source code into a Readable or Unreadable class is referred to as Code Readability Classification. To build accurate classification models, existing studies focus on handcrafting features from different aspects that intuitively seem to correlate with code readability, and then exploring various machine learning algorithms based on the newly proposed features. On the contrary, our work opens up a new way to tackle the problem by using the technique of deep learning. Specifically, we propose IncepCRM, a novel model based on the Inception architecture that can learn multi-scale features automatically from source code with little manual intervention. We apply the information of human annotators as the auxiliary input for training IncepCRM and empirically verify the performance of IncepCRM on three publicly available datasets. The results show that: 1) Annotator information is beneficial for model performance as confirmed by robust statistical tests (i.e., the Brunner-Munzel test and Cliff's delta); 2) IncepCRM can achieve an improved accuracy against previously reported models across all datasets. The findings of our study confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of deep learning for code readability classification.