HermEs: Interactive Spreadsheet Formula Prediction via Hierarchical Formulet Expansion

Wanrong He, Haoyu Dong, Yihuai Gao, zhichao fan, Xingzhuo Guo, Zhitao Hou, Xiao Lv, Ran Jia, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang

Main: NLP Applications Main-poster Paper

Session 7: NLP Applications (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 12, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 12, Session 7 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: code generation and understanding
TLDR: We propose HermEs, the first approach for spreadsheet formula prediction via HiEraRchical forMulet ExpanSion, where hierarchical expansion means generating formulas following the underlying parse tree structure, and Formulet refers to commonly-used multi-level patterns mined from real formula parse ...
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Abstract: We propose HermEs, the first approach for spreadsheet formula prediction via HiEraRchical forMulet ExpanSion, where hierarchical expansion means generating formulas following the underlying parse tree structure, and Formulet refers to commonly-used multi-level patterns mined from real formula parse trees. HermEs improves the formula prediction accuracy by (1) guaranteeing correct grammar by hierarchical generation rather than left-to-right generation and (2) significantly streamlining the token-level decoding with high-level Formulet. Notably, instead of generating formulas in a pre-defined fixed order, we propose a novel sampling strategy to systematically exploit a variety of hierarchical and multi-level expansion orders and provided solid mathematical proof, with the aim of meeting diverse human needs of the formula writing order in real applications. We further develop an interactive formula completion interface based on \textsc{HermEs}, which shows a new user experience in https://github.com/formulet/HERMES.