ECMG: Exemplar-based Commit Message Generation

Commit messages concisely describe the content of code diffs (i.e., code changes) and the intent behind them. Recently, many approaches have been proposed to generate commit messages automatically. The information retrieval-based methods reuse the commit messages of similar code diffs, while the neural-based methods learn the semantic connection between code diffs and commit messages. However, the reused commit messages might not accurately describe the content/intent of code diffs and neural-based methods tend to generate high-frequent and repetitive tokens in the corpus. In this paper, we combine the advantages of the two technical routes and propose a novel exemplar-based neural commit message generation model, which treats the similar commit message as an exemplar and leverages it to guide the neural network model to generate an accurate commit message. We perform extensive experiments and the results confirm the effectiveness of our model.