gMeta: Template-based Regular Expression Generation over Noisy Examples

Abstract

Regular expressions (regexes) are widely used in different fields of computer science, such as programming languages, string processing, and databases. However, existing tools for synthesizing or repairing regexes always assume that the input examples are faultless. In real industrial scenarios, this assumption does not entirely hold. Thus, this paper presents a simple but effective templated-based approach to generate regular expressions over noisy examples. Specifically, we present a data model (i.e., MetaParam) to extract features of strings for clustering all examples. Then, we propose a practical dynamic thresholding scheme to filter out anomalous examples via detecting knee points on CDF graphs. Finally, we design a template-based algorithm to translate a finite of positve examples to regular expression, which is efficient, interpretable, and extensible. We performed an experimental evaluation on four different extraction tasks applied to real-world datasets and obtained promising results in terms of F-measure. Moreover, gMeta achieves excellent results in real industrial scenarios.