Fine-Grained Code Clone Detection with Block-Based Splitting of Abstract Syntax Tree

Code clone detection aims to find similar code fragments and gains increasing importance in the field of software engineering. There are several types of techniques for detecting code clones. Text-based or token-based code clone detectors are scalable and efficient but lack consideration of syntax, thus resulting in poor performance in detecting syntactic code clones. Although some tree-based methods have been proposed to detect syntactic or semantic code clones with decent performance, they are mostly time-consuming and lack scalability. In addition, these detection methods can not realize fine-grained code clone detection. They are unable to distinguish the concrete code blocks that are cloned. In this paper, we design Tamer, a scalable and fine-grained tree-based syntactic code clone detector. Specifically, we propose a novel method to transform the complex abstract syntax tree into simple subtrees. It can accelerate the process of detection and implement the fine-grained analysis of clone pairs to locate the concrete clone parts of the code. To examine the detection performance and scalability of Tamer, we evaluate it on a widely used dataset BigCloneBench. Experimental results show that Tamer outperforms ten state-of-the-art code clone detection tools (i.e., CCAligner, SourcererCC, Siamese, NIL, NiCad, LVMapper, Deckard, Yang2018, CCFinder, and CloneWorks).