SODBench: A Large Language Model Approach to Documenting Spreadsheet Operations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Indika, Amila, Molybog, Igor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Indika, Amila
Molybog, Igor
author_facet Indika, Amila
Molybog, Igor
contents Numerous knowledge workers utilize spreadsheets in business, accounting, and finance. However, a lack of systematic documentation methods for spreadsheets hinders automation, collaboration, and knowledge transfer, which risks the loss of crucial institutional knowledge. This paper introduces Spreadsheet Operations Documentation (SOD), an AI task that involves generating human-readable explanations from spreadsheet operations. Many previous studies have utilized Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating spreadsheet manipulation code; however, translating that code into natural language for SOD is a less-explored area. To address this, we present a benchmark of 111 spreadsheet manipulation code snippets, each paired with a corresponding natural language summary. We evaluate five LLMs, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, LLaMA-3.3-70B, Mixtral-8x7B, and Gemma2-9B, using BLEU, GLEU, ROUGE-L, and METEOR metrics. Our findings suggest that LLMs can generate accurate spreadsheet documentation, making SOD a feasible prerequisite step toward enhancing reproducibility, maintainability, and collaborative workflows in spreadsheets, although there are challenges that need to be addressed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19864
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SODBench: A Large Language Model Approach to Documenting Spreadsheet Operations
Indika, Amila
Molybog, Igor
Software Engineering
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Numerous knowledge workers utilize spreadsheets in business, accounting, and finance. However, a lack of systematic documentation methods for spreadsheets hinders automation, collaboration, and knowledge transfer, which risks the loss of crucial institutional knowledge. This paper introduces Spreadsheet Operations Documentation (SOD), an AI task that involves generating human-readable explanations from spreadsheet operations. Many previous studies have utilized Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating spreadsheet manipulation code; however, translating that code into natural language for SOD is a less-explored area. To address this, we present a benchmark of 111 spreadsheet manipulation code snippets, each paired with a corresponding natural language summary. We evaluate five LLMs, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, LLaMA-3.3-70B, Mixtral-8x7B, and Gemma2-9B, using BLEU, GLEU, ROUGE-L, and METEOR metrics. Our findings suggest that LLMs can generate accurate spreadsheet documentation, making SOD a feasible prerequisite step toward enhancing reproducibility, maintainability, and collaborative workflows in spreadsheets, although there are challenges that need to be addressed.
title SODBench: A Large Language Model Approach to Documenting Spreadsheet Operations
topic Software Engineering
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19864