On the Naturalness of Auto-generated Code-Can We Identify Auto-Generated Code Automatically?-

Recently, a variety of studies have been conducted on source code analysis. If auto-generated code is included in the target source code, it is usually removed in a preprocessing phase because the presence of auto-generated code may have negative effects on source code analysis. A straightforward way to remove autogenerated code is searching special comments that are included in the files of auto-generated code. However, it becomes impossible to identify auto-generated code with the way if such special comments have disappeared for some reasons. It is obvious that it takes too much effort to see source files one by one manually. In this paper, we propose a new technique to identify auto-generated code by using the naturalness of auto-generated code. We used a golden set that includes thousands of hand-made source files and source files generated by four kinds of compiler-compilers. Through the evaluation with the dataset, we confirmed that our technique was able to identify auto-generated code with over 99% precision and recall for all the cases.