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BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations

Summary: BlinkFill augments PBE for syntactic string transformations with semi-supervised learning from logical patterns in input data, compactly represented by an InputDataGraph. Across 207 benchmarks, it synthesizes desired programs 41× faster than FlashFill while requiring fewer examples (1.27 vs. 1.53). (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID
11557
Venue
VLDB
Year
2016
Pagerank
0.00011883163
Overall Rank
1,160 | 92.05%
DOI
10.14778/2977797.2977807

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{singh_vldb16,
        title = {{BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations}},
        author = {Singh, Rishabh},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '16},
        volume = {9},
        number = {10},
        doi = {10.14778/2977797.2977807},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2977797.2977807},
        year = {2016}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 24 of 24 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1,165 Foofah: Transforming Data By Example 2017 SIGMOD 0.00011860616
1,476 Baran: Effective Error Correction via a Unified Context Representation and Transfer Learning 2020 VLDB 0.00010659277
2,297 Raha: A Configuration-Free Error Detection System 2019 SIGMOD 8.7897221e-05
2,728 Uni-Detect: A Unified Approach to Automated Error Detection in Tables 2019 SIGMOD 8.1995954e-05
2,744 Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks 2020 SIGMOD 8.1781662e-05
2,978 Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations 2018 VLDB 7.9030989e-05
2,980 Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations 2017 VLDB 7.8975073e-05
4,412 Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns 2020 VLDB 6.7168614e-05
4,757 Pattern Functional Dependencies for Data Cleaning 2020 VLDB 6.5220005e-05
4,875 Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search 2021 VLDB 6.4689177e-05
4,990 Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V 2023 VLDB 6.4105738e-05
6,200 New Trends on Exploratory Methods for Data Analytics 2017 VLDB 5.9457282e-05
6,533 Data Migration using Datalog Program Synthesis 2020 VLDB 5.8488042e-05
6,545 DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models 2024 SIGMOD 5.8454882e-05
6,809 Web Data Extraction using Hybrid Program Synthesis: A Combination of Top-down and Bottom-up Inference 2020 SIGMOD 5.7663737e-05
7,078 Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel 2018 SIGMOD 5.7095504e-05
8,217 Automated Migration of Hierarchical Data to Relational Tables using Programming-by-Example 2018 VLDB 5.4644927e-05
8,358 Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples 2019 SIGMOD 5.4446041e-05
9,020 Data-Driven Insight Synthesis for Multi-Dimensional Data 2024 VLDB 5.3306775e-05
9,380 Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence 2025 VLDB 5.2755515e-05
9,505 TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations 2025 VLDB 5.258497e-05
10,202 BAT: Target-Instance-Free Data Preparation Synthesis via LLM-Driven Tree Search 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,867 Weak-to-Strong Prompts with Lightweight-to-Powerful LLMs for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost, and Explainable Data Transformation 2025 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,541 SPINE: Scaling up Programming-by-Negative-Example for String Filtering and Transformation 2022 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
94 Potter's Wheel: An Interactive Data Cleaning System 2001 VLDB 0.00034616103
1,316 Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web 2009 VLDB 0.00011181216
1,866 Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation 2015 CIDR 9.5914583e-05
3,547 Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples 2012 VLDB 7.3225973e-05
3,574 TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment 2015 SIGMOD 7.2958137e-05
4,525 SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora 2015 VLDB 6.6456999e-05
4,546 DataXFormer: An Interactive Data Transformation Tool 2015 SIGMOD 6.6374215e-05
6,092 DataXFormer: Leveraging the Web for Semantic Transformations 2015 CIDR 5.9794237e-05
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