Automating user notice generation for smart contract functions

• Main Authors: HU, Xing, GAO, Zhipeng, XIA, Xin, LO, David, YANG, Xiaohu
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: Smart Contract; User Notice Generation; Deep Learning; Databases and Information Systems; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6837; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7840/viewcontent/ase214.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Smart contracts have obtained much attention and are crucial for automatic financial and business transactions. For end-users who have never seen the source code, they can read the user notice shown in end-user client to understand what a transaction does of a smart contract function. However, due to time constraints or lack of motivation, user notice is often missing during the development of smart contracts. For endusers who lack the information of the user notices, there is no easy way for them to check the code semantics of the smart contracts. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new approach SMARTDOC to generate user notice for smart contract functions automatically. Our tool can help end-users better understand the smart contract and aware of the financial risks, improving the users’ confidence on the reliability of the smart contracts. SMARTDOC exploits the Transformer to learn the representation of source code and generates natural language descriptions from the learned representation. We also integrate the Pointer mechanism to copy words from the input source code instead of generating words during the prediction process. We extract 7,878 hfunction, noticei pairs from 54,739 smart contracts written in Solidity. Due to the limited amount of collected smart contract functions (i.e., 7,878 functions), we exploit a transfer learning technique to utilize the learned knowledge to improve the performance of SMARTDOC. The learned knowledge obtained by the pre-training on a corpus of Java code, that has similar characteristics as Solidity code. The experimental results show that our approach can effectively generate user notice given the source code and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches. To investigate human perspectives on our generated user notice, we also conduct a human evaluation and ask participants to score user notice generated by different approaches. Results show that SMARTDOC outperforms baselines from three aspects, naturalness, informativeness, and similarity.