Understanding the algorithms described in program code can help programmers grasp the program and carry out various software engineering tasks. Because manual understanding of program algorithms requires programmers to have rich professional knowledge and is time-consuming and labor-intensive, the main research goal of program algorithm recognition is to achieve automation of program algorithm understanding, which is more efficient and accurate compared to manual understanding. This paper systematically organized the relevant work in the field of program algorithm recognition. Firstly, it combed the concepts related to program algorithm recognition and introduce methods based on knowledge representation and information retrieval. Secondly, it divided the code representation based methods into sequence based, tree based and graph based methods for detailed elaboration, and made a summary and comparison of the three types of methods. Finally, it introduced the relevant application fields of the program algorithm recognition task, analyzed the remaining problems and made prospects for future development.

[2023-12-29] Accepted Paper /doc/2023.09.0504/v1