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Softw. Eng. Methodol."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,31]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n            Programming by example (PBE) is an emerging programming paradigm that automatically synthesizes programs specified by user-provided input-output examples. Despite the convenience for end-users, implementing PBE tools often requires strong expertise in programming language and synthesis algorithms. Such a level of knowledge is uncommon among software developers. It greatly limits the broad adoption of PBE by the industry. To facilitate the adoption of PBE techniques, we propose a PBE framework called\n            <jats:sc>Bee<\/jats:sc>\n            , which leverages an \u201centity-action\u201d model based on relational tables to ease PBE development for a wide but restrained range of domains. Implementing PBE tools with\n            <jats:sc>Bee<\/jats:sc>\n            only requires adapting domain-specific data entities and user actions to tables, with no need to design a domain-specific language or an efficient synthesis algorithm. The synthesis algorithm of\n            <jats:sc>Bee<\/jats:sc>\n            exploits bidirectional searching and constraint-solving techniques to address the challenge of value computation nested in table transformation. We evaluated\n            <jats:sc>Bee<\/jats:sc>\n            \u2019s effectiveness on 64 PBE tasks from three different domains and usability with a human study of 12 participants. Evaluation results show that\n            <jats:sc>Bee<\/jats:sc>\n            is easier to learn and use than the state-of-the-art PBE framework, and the bidirectional algorithm achieves comparable performance to domain-specifically optimized synthesizers.\n          <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3607185","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,7,7]],"date-time":"2023-07-07T11:56:32Z","timestamp":1688730992000},"page":"1-36","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Programming by Example Made Easy"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"33","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6126-303X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jiarong","family":"Wu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2428-4111","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lili","family":"Wei","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7651-9560","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yanyan","family":"Jiang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology and Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3508-7172","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Shing-Chi","family":"Cheung","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-5291-7880","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Luyao","family":"Ren","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Lab of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education Department of Computer Science and Technology, EECS, Peking University, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6299-4704","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Chang","family":"Xu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology and Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,11,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_3_2_2","unstructured":"2023. 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