In the past, techniques for detecting similarly behaving code fragments were often only evaluated with small, artificial oracles or with code originating from programming competitions. Such code fragments differ largely from production codes. To enable more realistic evaluations, this paper presents SeSaMe, a data set of method pairs that are classified according to their semantic similarity. We applied text similarity measures on JavaDoc comments mined from 11 open source repositories and manually classified a selection of 857 pairs.

During the life span of large software projects, developers often apply the same code changes to different code locations in slight variations. Since the application of these changes to all locations is time-consuming and error-prone, tools exist that learn change patterns from input examples, search for possible pattern applications, and generate corresponding recommendations. In many cases, the generated recommendations are syntactically or semantically wrong due to code movements in the input examples. Thus, they are of low accuracy and developers cannot directly copy them into their projects without adjustments.