(7) A Colorful Approach to Text Processing by Example

[UIST '13]
A Colorful Approach to Text Processing by Example

Kuat Yessenov   Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
Shubham Tulsiani IIT, Kanpur, India
Aditya Menon         University of California, San Diego, San Diego, USA
Robert C. Miller Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
Sumit Gulwani Microsoft, Redmond, USA
Butler Lampson Microsoft Research, Cambridge, USA
Adam Kalai         Microsoft Research, Cambridge, USA

Text processing, tedious and error-prone even for programmers, remains one of the most alluring targets of Programming by Example. An examination of real-world text processing tasks found on help forums reveals that many such tasks, beyond simple string manipulation, involve latent hierarchical structures.

We present STEPS, a programming system for processing structured and semi-structured text by example. STEPS users create and manipulate hierarchical structure by example. In a between-subject user study on fourteen computer scientists, STEPS compares favorably to traditional programming.