Hatice Kübra Çaglar

dblp:410/6039 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Software engineering, system software, and programming languages
1 paper
Software maintenance and evolution · 100%

Topics — the 1 heaviest of 1, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Software maintenance and evolution › software documentation
code comment quality
0.912025
Automated Inline Comment Smell Detection and Repair with Large Language Models · ASE 2025

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

zero-shot prompting · 0.9large language model · 0.9few-shot prompting · 0.9
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Automated Inline Comment Smell Detection and Repair with Large Language Models
abstract
Context: Code comments play a critical role in improving code readability, maintainability, and collaborative development. However, comments may deviate from best practices due to software evolution, where code changes are not reflected in comments, as well as practitioner-related issues such as vague descriptions, redundancy, or misaligned intent. These issues lead to various comment smells that degrade software quality. While prior studies have explored comment inconsistencies, most are limited in scope, either addressing a narrow subset of smells or focusing solely on detection without considering repair.Objective: This study evaluates the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in both detecting and repairing inline code comment smells, using a comprehensive taxonomy of code comment smell types.Method: We extended a prior data set by incorporating repaired versions of smelly comments, resulting in 2,211 unique instances. Four LLMs—GPT-4o-mini, o3-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and Codestral-2501—are evaluated under zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies. To account for non-deterministic behavior in LLM outputs and ensure robustness, each configuration is executed five times. Detection performance is measured using accuracy, macro F1 score, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC); repair is evaluated using SBERT similarity, METEOR, and ROUGE-L. Our multi-stage pipeline feeds detection outputs into the repair phase, where the detection result with the highest macro F1 score is used to simulate the best possible repair scenario. Median scores across runs are reported for comparison.Results: o3-mini with few-shot prompting achieves the highest median detection performance: macro F1 of 0.41, MCC of 0.50, and accuracy of 0.72, exceeding the baseline of GPT-4. For repair, Codestral-2501 in the zero-shot setting yields the best results with a median SBERT score of 0.61, followed by DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o-mini at 0.53, and o3-mini at 0.46. Few-shot prompts improve detection, while zero-shot prompts are more effective for repair.Conclusion: Lightweight LLMs such as o3-mini can achieve strong detection performance when guided by effective few-shot prompts. For example, o3-mini with few-shot prompting attains the highest median detection results: macro F1 of 0.41, MCC of 0.50, and accuracy of 0.72, surpassing the GPT-4 baseline. In contrast, repair tasks benefit more from zero-shot prompting, though they introduce challenges such as overfitting and the risk of generating new smells. Our findings support the development of practical tools, including a GitHub-integrated comment repair assistant, and motivate future work on dynamic prompt selection and multilingual benchmark construction.
Hatice Kübra Çaglar, Semih Çaglar, Eray Tüzün
ASE1