Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chen, Sibei, He, Yeye, Cui, Weiwei, Fan, Ju, Ge, Song, Zhang, Haidong, Zhang, Dongmei, Chaudhuri, Surajit
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Chen, Sibei
He, Yeye
Cui, Weiwei
Fan, Ju
Ge, Song
Zhang, Haidong
Zhang, Dongmei
Chaudhuri, Surajit
author_facet Chen, Sibei
He, Yeye
Cui, Weiwei
Fan, Ju
Ge, Song
Zhang, Haidong
Zhang, Dongmei
Chaudhuri, Surajit
contents Spreadsheets are widely recognized as the most popular end-user programming tools, which blend the power of formula-based computation, with an intuitive table-based interface. Today, spreadsheets are used by billions of users to manipulate tables, most of whom are neither database experts nor professional programmers. Despite the success of spreadsheets, authoring complex formulas remains challenging, as non-technical users need to look up and understand non-trivial formula syntax. To address this pain point, we leverage the observation that there is often an abundance of similar-looking spreadsheets in the same organization, which not only have similar data, but also share similar computation logic encoded as formulas. We develop an Auto-Formula system that can accurately predict formulas that users want to author in a target spreadsheet cell, by learning and adapting formulas that already exist in similar spreadsheets, using contrastive-learning techniques inspired by "similar-face recognition" from compute vision. Extensive evaluations on over 2K test formulas extracted from real enterprise spreadsheets show the effectiveness of Auto-Formula over alternatives. Our benchmark data is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Auto-Formula to facilitate future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_12608
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations
Chen, Sibei
He, Yeye
Cui, Weiwei
Fan, Ju
Ge, Song
Zhang, Haidong
Zhang, Dongmei
Chaudhuri, Surajit
Databases
Computation and Language
Programming Languages
Spreadsheets are widely recognized as the most popular end-user programming tools, which blend the power of formula-based computation, with an intuitive table-based interface. Today, spreadsheets are used by billions of users to manipulate tables, most of whom are neither database experts nor professional programmers. Despite the success of spreadsheets, authoring complex formulas remains challenging, as non-technical users need to look up and understand non-trivial formula syntax. To address this pain point, we leverage the observation that there is often an abundance of similar-looking spreadsheets in the same organization, which not only have similar data, but also share similar computation logic encoded as formulas. We develop an Auto-Formula system that can accurately predict formulas that users want to author in a target spreadsheet cell, by learning and adapting formulas that already exist in similar spreadsheets, using contrastive-learning techniques inspired by "similar-face recognition" from compute vision. Extensive evaluations on over 2K test formulas extracted from real enterprise spreadsheets show the effectiveness of Auto-Formula over alternatives. Our benchmark data is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Auto-Formula to facilitate future research.
title Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations
topic Databases
Computation and Language
Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12608