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


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 HermEs, which shows a new user experience in https://github.com/formulet/HERMES.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.465
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8356–8372
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.465
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.465
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wanrong He, Haoyu Dong, Yihuai Gao, Zhichao Fan, Xingzhuo Guo, Zhitao Hou, Xiao Lv, Ran Jia, Shi Han, and Dongmei Zhang. 2023. HermEs: Interactive Spreadsheet Formula Prediction via Hierarchical Formulet Expansion. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8356–8372, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HermEs: Interactive Spreadsheet Formula Prediction via Hierarchical Formulet Expansion (He et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.465.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.465.mp4