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: hdb9a933add9d5d06
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2016
Pagerank: 0.0001205355
Overall Rank: 1,094 | 92.65%
DOI: 10.14778/2977797.2977807

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Rishabh Singh (Microsoft)

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 25 of 25 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,115	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011964111
1,342	Baran: Effective Error Correction via a Unified Context Representation and Transfer Learning	2020	VLDB	0.00010968223
1,805	Raha: A Configuration-Free Error Detection System	2019	SIGMOD	9.59842e-05
2,612	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	8.2265197e-05
2,641	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1787073e-05
2,745	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations	2018	VLDB	8.0668395e-05
2,748	Uni-Detect: A Unified Approach to Automated Error Detection in Tables	2019	SIGMOD	8.0610697e-05
4,235	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	6.713221e-05
4,424	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.6048065e-05
4,843	Pattern Functional Dependencies for Data Cleaning	2020	VLDB	6.3839159e-05
5,097	Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V	2023	VLDB	6.2742361e-05
5,687	DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models	2024	SIGMOD	6.0360406e-05
6,330	New Trends on Exploratory Methods for Data Analytics	2017	VLDB	5.8123256e-05
6,657	Data Migration using Datalog Program Synthesis	2020	VLDB	5.7187028e-05
6,947	Web Data Extraction using Hybrid Program Synthesis: A Combination of Top-down and Bottom-up Inference	2020	SIGMOD	5.6369918e-05
7,148	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel	2018	SIGMOD	5.5989952e-05
7,526	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	5.5020723e-05
7,928	TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations	2025	VLDB	5.4254488e-05
8,381	Automated Migration of Hierarchical Data to Relational Tables using Programming-by-Example	2018	VLDB	5.3428083e-05
8,510	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD	5.326492e-05
9,192	Data-Driven Insight Synthesis for Multi-Dimensional Data	2024	VLDB	5.2110714e-05
10,418	BAT: Target-Instance-Free Data Preparation Synthesis via LLM-Driven Tree Search	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
10,869	DeepPrep: An LLM-Powered Agentic System for Autonomous Data Preparation	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,270	Weak-to-Strong Prompts with Lightweight-to-Powerful LLMs for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost, and Explainable Data Transformation	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,850	SPINE: Scaling up Programming-by-Negative-Example for String Filtering and Transformation	2022	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

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
95	Potter's Wheel: An Interactive Data Cleaning System	2001	VLDB	0.00034382643
1,337	Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web	2009	VLDB	0.00010987014
1,871	Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation	2015	CIDR	9.464979e-05
3,587	Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples	2012	VLDB	7.1881077e-05
3,615	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.1591776e-05
4,206	SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora	2015	VLDB	6.7348167e-05
4,585	DataXFormer: An Interactive Data Transformation Tool	2015	SIGMOD	6.5179286e-05
6,138	DataXFormer: Leveraging the Web for Semantic Transformations	2015	CIDR	5.8736177e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,493	Synthesizing Entity Matching Rules by Examples	2018	VLDB
2	10,853	Auto-Fill: Learning to Predict Missing Values Accurately with Specialist Language Models	2026	VLDB
3	6,947	Web Data Extraction using Hybrid Program Synthesis: A Combination of Top-down and Bottom-up Inference	2020	SIGMOD
4	270	BLINKS: Ranked Keyword Searches on Graphs	2007	SIGMOD
5	3,553	Learning String Transformations From Examples	2009	VLDB
6	4,424	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB
7	9,043	GBLENDER: Towards Blending Visual Query Formulation and Query Processing in Graph Databases	2010	SIGMOD
8	5,877	BlinkML: Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Probabilistic Guarantees	2019	SIGMOD
9	11,850	SPINE: Scaling up Programming-by-Negative-Example for String Filtering and Transformation	2022	SIGMOD
10	3,587	Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples	2012	VLDB