{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,23]],"date-time":"2026-07-23T18:20:30Z","timestamp":1784830830498,"version":"3.55.0"},"reference-count":18,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"8","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Proc. VLDB Endow."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2012,4]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n            We address the problem of performing semantic transformations on strings, which may represent a variety of data types (or their combination) such as a column in a relational table, time, date, currency, etc. Unlike syntactic transformations, which are based on regular expressions and which interpret a string as a sequence of characters, semantic transformations additionally require exploiting the semantics of the data type represented by the string, which may be encoded as a database of relational tables. Manually performing such transformations on a large collection of strings is error prone and cumbersome, while programmatic solutions are beyond the skill-set of end-users. We present a\n            <jats:italic>programming by example<\/jats:italic>\n            technology that allows end-users to automate such repetitive tasks.\n          <\/jats:p>\n          <jats:p>We describe an expressive transformation language for semantic manipulation that combines table lookup operations and syntactic manipulations. We then present a synthesis algorithm that can learn all transformations in the language that are consistent with the user-provided set of input-output examples. We have implemented this technology as an add-in for the Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet system and have evaluated it successfully over several benchmarks picked from various Excel help-forums.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.14778\/2212351.2212356","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2014,6,24]],"date-time":"2014-06-24T12:17:57Z","timestamp":1403612277000},"page":"740-751","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":75,"title":["Learning semantic string transformations from examples"],"prefix":"10.14778","volume":"5","author":[{"given":"Rishabh","family":"Singh","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, MA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Sumit","family":"Gulwani","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,4]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDE.2008.4497412"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14778\/1687627.1687686"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1804669.1804683"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1007568.1007612"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_5_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TKDE.2007.9"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_6_1","volume-title":"Forrester Report for Application Development and Program Management Professionals","author":"Gualtieri M.","year":"2009"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_7_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1836089.1836091"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_8_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1926385.1926423"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_9_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2240236.2240260"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_10_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1993498.1993536"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_11_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1806799.1806833"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_12_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1142473.1142599"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_13_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1609\/aimag.v30i4.2262"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_14_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1023\/A:1025671410623"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_15_1","first-page":"161","volume-title":"USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track","author":"Miller R. 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