Cross-language source code re-use detection using latent semantic analysis

Abstract

[EN] Nowadays, Internet is the main source to get information from blogs, encyclopedias, discussion forums, source code repositories, and more resources which are available just one click away. The temptation to re-use these materials is very high. Even source codes are easily available through a simple search on the Web. There is a need of detecting potential instances of source code re-use. Source code re-use detection has usually been approached comparing source codes in their compiled version. When dealing with cross-language source code re-use, traditional pproaches can deal only with the programming languages supported by the compiler. We assume that a source code is a piece of text ,with its syntax and structure, so we aim at applying models for free text re-use detection to source code. In this paper we compare a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) approach with previously used text re-use detection models for measuring cross-language similarity in source code. The LSA-based approach shows slightly better results than the other models, being able to distinguish between re-used and related source codes with a high performance.