TransRegex: Multi-modal Regular Expression Synthesis by Generate-and-Repair

Since regular expressions (abbrev. regexes) are difficult to understand and compose, automatically generating regexes has been an important research problem. This paper introduces TransRegex, for automatically constructing regexes from both natural language descriptions and examples. To the best of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 1210 - 1222
Main Authors: Li, Yeting, Li, Shuaimin, Xu, Zhiwu, Cao, Jialun, Chen, Zixuan, Hu, Yun, Chen, Haiming, Cheung, Shing-Chi
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.05.2021
Subjects:
Maintenance engineering
Natural languages
programming by example
programming by natural languages
regex repair
regex synthesis
Software engineering
ISBN:1665402962, 9781665402965
ISSN:1558-1225
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Since regular expressions (abbrev. regexes) are difficult to understand and compose, automatically generating regexes has been an important research problem. This paper introduces TransRegex, for automatically constructing regexes from both natural language descriptions and examples. To the best of our knowledge, TransRegex is the first to treat the NLP-and-example-based regex synthesis problem as the problem of NLP-based synthesis with regex repair. For this purpose, we present novel algorithms for both NLP-based synthesis and regex repair. We evaluate TransRegex with ten relevant state-of-the-art tools on three publicly available datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate that the accuracy of our TransRegex is 17.4%, 35.8% and 38.9% higher than that of NLP-based approaches on the three datasets, respectively. Furthermore, TransRegex can achieve higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art multi-modal techniques with 10% to 30% higher accuracy on all three datasets. The evaluation results also indicate TransRegex utilizing natural language and examples in a more effective way.
ISBN:1665402962
9781665402965
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00111