The Usability of Pragmatic Communication in Regular Expression Synthesis
Programming-by-example (PBE) systems aim to alleviate the burden of programming. However, user-specified examples are often ambiguous, leaving multiple programs to satisfy the specification. Consequently, in most prior work, users have had to provide additional examples, particularly negative ones,...
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Main Authors | , , |
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Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
12.08.2023
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Programming-by-example (PBE) systems aim to alleviate the burden of
programming. However, user-specified examples are often ambiguous, leaving
multiple programs to satisfy the specification. Consequently, in most prior
work, users have had to provide additional examples, particularly negative
ones, to further constrain the search over compatible programs. Recent work
resolves additional ambiguity by modeling program synthesis tasks as pragmatic
communication, showing promising results on a graphics domain using a
rudimentary user-study. We adapt pragmatic reasoning to a sub-domain of regular
expressions and rigorously study its usability as a means of communication both
with and without the ability to provide negative examples. Our user study
(N=30) demonstrates that, with a pragmatic synthesizer, end-users can more
successfully communicate a target regex using positive examples alone (95%)
compared to using a non-pragmatic synthesizer (51%). Further, users can
communicate more efficiently (57% fewer examples) with a pragmatic synthesizer
compared to a non-pragmatic one. |
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DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.2308.06656 |