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Record W2025962632 · doi:10.1109/icsme.2014.54

Evaluating Modern Clone Detection Tools

2014· article· en· W2025962632 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Saskatchewan
Fundersnot available
Keywordsclone (Java method)Benchmark (surveying)Computer sciencePrecision and recallCloning (programming)Software maintenanceMatching (statistics)Code (set theory)SoftwareCode refactoringSoftware engineeringMachine learningArtificial intelligenceData miningSoftware systemProgramming languageBiologyGenetics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Many clone detection tools and techniques have been introduced in the literature, and these tools have been used to manage clones and study their effects on software maintenance and evolution. However, the performance of these modern tools is not well known, especially recall. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the recall of eleven modern clone detection tools using four benchmark frameworks, including: (1) Bellon's Framework, (2) our modification to Bellon's Framework to improve the accuracy of its clone matching metrics, (3) Murakamki et al.'s extension of Bellon's Framework which adds type 3 gap awareness to the framework, and (4) our Mutation and Injection Framework. Bellon's Framework uses a curated corpus of manually validated clones detected by tools contemporary to 2002. In contrast, our Mutation and Injection Framework synthesizes a corpus of artificial clones using a cloning taxonomy produced in 2009. While still very popular in the clone community, there is some concern that Bellon's corpus may not be accurate for modern clone detection tools. We investigate the accuracy of the frameworks by (1) checking for anomalies in their results, (2) checking for agreement between the frameworks, and (3) checking for agreement with our expectations of these tools. Our expectations are researched and flexible. While expectations may contain inaccuracies, they are valuable for identifying possible inaccuracies in a benchmark. We find anomalies in the results of Bellon's Framework, and disagreement with both our expectations and the Mutation Framework. We conclude that Bellon's Framework may not be accurate for modern tools, and that an update of its corpus with clones detected by the modern tools is warranted. The results of the Mutation Framework agree with our expectations in most cases. We suggest that it is a good solution for evaluating modern tools.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.969
Threshold uncertainty score0.194

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.072
GPT teacher head0.340
Teacher spread0.268 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Quick stats

Citations122
Published2014
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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