Enhancing Source-Based Clone Detection Using Intermediate Representation

Detecting software clones in large scale projects helps improve the maintainability of large code bases. The source code representation (e.g., Java or C files) of a software system has traditionally been used for clone detection. In this paper, we propose a technique that transforms the source code to an intermediate representation, and then reuses established source-based clone detection techniques to detect clones in the intermediate representation. The clones are mapped back to the source code and are used to augment the results reported by source-based clone detection. We demonstrate the performance of our new technique using systems from the Bellon clone evaluation benchmark. The result shows that our technique can detect Type 3 clones. Our technique has higher recall with minimal drop in precision using Bellon corpus. By examining the complete clone groups, our technique has higher precision than the standalone string based and token based clone detectors.