In plain words: A large language model scans training data and drops vague, unhelpful code review comments that earlier cleanup rules miss. Tools trained on the cleaned data wrote comments about 13% more like real human feedback than tools trained on the noisy data.
Abstract · Too Noisy To Learn: Enhancing Data Quality for Code Review Comment Generation
Code review is an important practice in software development, yet it is time-consuming and requires substantial effort. While open-source datasets have been used to train neural models for automating code review tasks, including review comment generation, these datasets contain a significant amount of noisy comments (e.g., vague or non-actionable feedback) that persist despite cleaning methods using heuristics and machine learning approaches. Such remaining noise may lead models to generate low-quality review comments, yet removing them requires a complex semantic understanding of both code changes and natural language comments. In this paper, we investigate the impact of such noise on review comment generation and propose a novel approach using large language models (LLMs) to further clean these datasets. Based on an empirical study on a large-scale code review dataset, our LLM-based approach achieves 66-85% precision in detecting valid comments. Using the predicted valid comments to fine-tune the state-of-the-art code review models (cleaned models) can generate review comments that are 13.0% - 12.4% more similar to valid human-written comments than the original models. We also find that the cleaned models can generate more informative and relevant comments than the original models. Our findings underscore the critical impact of dataset quality on the performance of review comment generation. We advocate for further research into cleaning training data to enhance the practical utility and quality of automated code review.
Chunhua Liu, Hong Yi Lin, Patanamon Thongtanunam
arXiv:2502.02757 · cs.SE · submitted Feb 4, 2025 · updated Feb 6, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · The paper is published at the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR2025)