Interactive Program Synthesis by Augmented Examples

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Programming-by-example (PBE) has become an increasingly popular component in software development tools, humanrobot interaction, and end-user programming. A long-standing challenge in PBE is the inherent ambiguity in user-provided examples. This paper presents an interaction model to disambiguate user intent and reduce the cognitive load of understanding and validating synthesized programs. Our model provides two types of augmentations to user-given examples: 1) semantic augmentation where a user can specify how different aspects of an example should be treated by a synthesizer via light-weight annotations, and 2) data augmentation where the synthesizer generates additional examples to help the user understand and validate synthesized programs. We implement and demonstrate this interaction model in the domain of regular expressions, which is a popular mechanism for text processing and data wrangling and is often considered hard to master even for experienced programmers. A within-subjects user study with twelve participants shows that, compared with only inspecting and annotating synthesized programs, interacting with augmented examples significantly increases the success rate of finishing a programming task with less time and increases users’ confidence of synthesized programs.