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: 0.00012039085
Overall Rank: 1,094 | 92.67%
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
1,111	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011946262
1,347	Baran: Effective Error Correction via a Unified Context Representation and Transfer Learning	2020	VLDB	0.00010947547
1,731	Raha: A Configuration-Free Error Detection System	2019	SIGMOD	9.7585913e-05
2,608	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	8.209962e-05
2,645	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1641056e-05
2,746	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations	2018	VLDB	8.0458815e-05
2,752	Uni-Detect: A Unified Approach to Automated Error Detection in Tables	2019	SIGMOD	8.0387193e-05
4,005	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	6.8448428e-05
4,444	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.5812416e-05
4,538	Pattern Functional Dependencies for Data Cleaning	2020	VLDB	6.5398994e-05
5,120	Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V	2023	VLDB	6.254003e-05
5,654	DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models	2024	SIGMOD	6.0324041e-05
6,344	New Trends on Exploratory Methods for Data Analytics	2017	VLDB	5.7903641e-05
6,670	Data Migration using Datalog Program Synthesis	2020	VLDB	5.6978388e-05
6,969	Web Data Extraction using Hybrid Program Synthesis: A Combination of Top-down and Bottom-up Inference	2020	SIGMOD	5.6156927e-05
7,170	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel	2018	SIGMOD	5.5784388e-05
7,548	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	5.481283e-05
7,946	TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations	2025	VLDB	5.404949e-05
8,400	Automated Migration of Hierarchical Data to Relational Tables using Programming-by-Example	2018	VLDB	5.3233925e-05
8,531	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD	5.3063661e-05
9,224	Data-Driven Insight Synthesis for Multi-Dimensional Data	2024	VLDB	5.1913816e-05
10,496	BAT: Target-Instance-Free Data Preparation Synthesis via LLM-Driven Tree Search	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,939	DeepPrep: An LLM-Powered Agentic System for Autonomous Data Preparation	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,334	Weak-to-Strong Prompts with Lightweight-to-Powerful LLMs for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost, and Explainable Data Transformation	2025	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,900	SPINE: Scaling up Programming-by-Negative-Example for String Filtering and Transformation	2022	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-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	0.00034319763
1,336	Harvesting Relational Tables from Lists on the Web	2009	VLDB	0.00010969394
1,875	Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation	2015	CIDR	9.4433754e-05
3,594	Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples	2012	VLDB	7.1638481e-05
3,618	TEGRA: Table Extraction by Global Record Alignment	2015	SIGMOD	7.1365624e-05
4,220	SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora	2015	VLDB	6.7137538e-05
4,600	DataXFormer: An Interactive Data Transformation Tool	2015	SIGMOD	6.4965061e-05
6,157	DataXFormer: Leveraging the Web for Semantic Transformations	2015	CIDR	5.8532316e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,489	Synthesizing Entity Matching Rules by Examples	2018	VLDB
2	10,923	Auto-Fill: Learning to Predict Missing Values Accurately with Specialist Language Models	2026	VLDB
3	6,969	Web Data Extraction using Hybrid Program Synthesis: A Combination of Top-down and Bottom-up Inference	2020	SIGMOD
4	272	BLINKS: Ranked Keyword Searches on Graphs	2007	SIGMOD
5	3,568	Learning String Transformations From Examples	2009	VLDB
6	4,444	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB
7	9,071	GBLENDER: Towards Blending Visual Query Formulation and Query Processing in Graph Databases	2010	SIGMOD
8	5,885	BlinkML: Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Probabilistic Guarantees	2019	SIGMOD
9	11,900	SPINE: Scaling up Programming-by-Negative-Example for String Filtering and Transformation	2022	SIGMOD
10	3,594	Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples	2012	VLDB