  Existing automatic code comment generators mainly focus on producing a
general description of functionality for a given code snippet without
considering developer intentions. However, in real-world practice, comments are
complicated, which often contain information reflecting various intentions of
developers, e.g., functionality summarization, design rationale, implementation
details, code properties, etc. To bridge the gap between automatic code comment
generation and real-world comment practice, we define Developer-Intent Driven
Code Comment Generation, which can generate intent-aware comments for the same
source code with different intents. To tackle this challenging task, we propose
DOME, an approach that utilizes Intent-guided Selective Attention to explicitly
select intent-relevant information from the source code, and produces various
comments reflecting different intents. Our approach is evaluated on two
real-world Java datasets, and the experimental results show that our approach
outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. A human evaluation also confirms
the significant potential of applying DOME in practical usage, enabling
developers to comment code effectively according to their own needs.
