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: 0.00012048043
Overall Rank: 1,095 | 92.65%
DOI: 10.14778/2977797.2977807
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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	0.00011958625
1,342	Baran: Effective Error Correction via a Unified Context Representation and Transfer Learning	2020	VLDB	0.00010963254
1,805	Raha: A Configuration-Free Error Detection System	2019	SIGMOD	9.5938877e-05
2,613	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	8.2229082e-05
2,642	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1751637e-05
2,744	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations	2018	VLDB	8.064168e-05
2,748	Uni-Detect: A Unified Approach to Automated Error Detection in Tables	2019	SIGMOD	8.0572603e-05
4,235	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	6.710043e-05
4,426	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.601896e-05
4,845	Pattern Functional Dependencies for Data Cleaning	2020	VLDB	6.3808938e-05
5,100	Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V	2023	VLDB	6.271266e-05
5,686	DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models	2024	SIGMOD	6.0347166e-05
6,333	New Trends on Exploratory Methods for Data Analytics	2017	VLDB	5.8095741e-05
6,661	Data Migration using Datalog Program Synthesis	2020	VLDB	5.7159966e-05
6,950	Web Data Extraction using Hybrid Program Synthesis: A Combination of Top-down and Bottom-up Inference	2020	SIGMOD	5.6343233e-05
7,150	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel	2018	SIGMOD	5.5963926e-05
7,531	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	5.4994676e-05
7,933	TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations	2025	VLDB	5.4228804e-05
8,387	Automated Migration of Hierarchical Data to Relational Tables using Programming-by-Example	2018	VLDB	5.3403083e-05
8,516	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD	5.3239705e-05
9,201	Data-Driven Insight Synthesis for Multi-Dimensional Data	2024	VLDB	5.2086045e-05
10,430	BAT: Target-Instance-Free Data Preparation Synthesis via LLM-Driven Tree Search	2026	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
10,878	DeepPrep: An LLM-Powered Agentic System for Autonomous Data Preparation	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,278	Weak-to-Strong Prompts with Lightweight-to-Powerful LLMs for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost, and Explainable Data Transformation	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,856	SPINE: Scaling up Programming-by-Negative-Example for String Filtering and Transformation	2022	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-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	0.00034367518
1,337	Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web	2009	VLDB	0.00010982201
1,872	Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation	2015	CIDR	9.4606235e-05
3,587	Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples	2012	VLDB	7.1847226e-05
3,615	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.1558238e-05
4,204	SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora	2015	VLDB	6.7331936e-05
4,587	DataXFormer: An Interactive Data Transformation Tool	2015	SIGMOD	6.5148596e-05
6,139	DataXFormer: Leveraging the Web for Semantic Transformations	2015	CIDR	5.870906e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,493	Synthesizing Entity Matching Rules by Examples	2018	VLDB
2	10,862	Auto-Fill: Learning to Predict Missing Values Accurately with Specialist Language Models	2026	VLDB
3	6,950	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	3,555	Learning String Transformations From Examples	2009	VLDB
6	4,426	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB
7	9,051	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	11,856	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