Prompt Learning for Multi-Label Code Smell Detection: A Promising Approach

Code smells indicate the potential problems of software quality so that developers can identify refactoring opportunities by detecting code smells. State-of-the-art approaches leverage heuristics, machine learning, and deep learning to detect code smells. However, existing approaches have not fully explored the potential of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose PromptSmell, a novel approach based on prompt learning for detecting multi-label code smell. Firstly, code snippets are acquired by traversing abstract syntax trees. Combined code snippets with natural language prompts and mask tokens, PromptSmell constructs the input of LLMs. Secondly, to detect multi-label code smell, we leverage a label combination approach by converting a multi-label problem into a multi-classification problem. A customized answer space is added to the word list of pre-trained language models, and the probability distribution of intermediate answers is obtained by predicting the words at the mask positions. Finally, the intermediate answers are mapped to the target class labels by a verbalizer as the final classification result. We evaluate the effectiveness of PromptSmell by answering six research questions. The experimental results demonstrate that PromptSmell obtains an improvement of 11.17% in precision_w and 7.4% in F1_w compared to existing approaches.