CONTEXT: Reusing software by means of copy and paste is a frequent activity in software
development. The duplicated code is known as a software clone and the activity is known as …

Bad smells are sub-optimal code structures that may represent problems needing attention.
We conduct an extensive literature review on bad smells relying on a large body of …

Technical debt is a metaphor introduced by Cunningham to indicate “not quite right code
which we postpone making it right”. One noticeable symptom of technical debt is …

Copying code and then pasting with large number of edits is a common activity in software
development, and the pasted code is a kind of complicated Type-3 clone. Due to large …

Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as sentiment analysis or syntactic
parsing, have benefited from the development of word embedding models. In particular …

Enriched by natural language texts, Stack Overflow code snippets are an invaluable code-
centric knowledge base of small units of source code. Besides being useful for software …

Clone detection finds application in many software engineering activities such as
comprehension and refactoring. However, the confounding configuration choice problem …

Clones are generally considered bad programming practice in software engineering
folklore. They are identified as a bad smell (Fowler et al. 1999) and a major contributor to …

Software clone detection is an active research area, which is very important for software
maintenance, bug detection, etc. The two pieces of cloned code reflect some similarities or …

Code Clones-duplicated source fragments-are said to increase maintenance effort and to
facilitate problems caused by inconsistent changes to identical parts. While this is certainly …