@inproceedings{li-etal-2025-autodcworkflow,
title = "{A}uto{DCW}orkflow: {LLM}-based Data Cleaning Workflow Auto-Generation and Benchmark",
author = {Li, Lan and
Fang, Liri and
Lud{\"a}scher, Bertram and
Torvik, Vetle I},
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.410/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.410",
pages = "7766--7780",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
abstract = "Data cleaning is a time-consuming and error-prone manual process even with modern workflow tools like OpenRefine. Here, we present AutoDCWorkflow, an LLM-based pipeline for automatically generating data-cleaning workflows. The pipeline takes a raw table coupled with a data analysis purpose, and generates a sequence of OpenRefine operations designed to produce a minimal, clean table sufficient to address the purpose. Six operations address common data quality issues including format inconsistencies, type errors, and duplicates.To evaluate AutoDCWorkflow, we create a benchmark with metrics assessing answers, data, and workflow quality for 142 purposes using 96 tables across six topics. The evaluation covers three key dimensions: (1) **Purpose Answer**: can the cleaned table produce a correct answer? (2) **Column (Value)**: how closely does it match the ground truth table? (3) **Workflow (Operations)**: to what extent does the generated workflow resemble the human-curated ground truth? Experiments show that Llama 3.1, Mistral, and Gemma 2 significantly enhance data quality, outperforming the baseline across all metrics. Gemma 2-27B consistently generates high-quality tables and answers, while Gemma 2-9B excels in producing workflows that resemble human annotations."
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<abstract>Data cleaning is a time-consuming and error-prone manual process even with modern workflow tools like OpenRefine. Here, we present AutoDCWorkflow, an LLM-based pipeline for automatically generating data-cleaning workflows. The pipeline takes a raw table coupled with a data analysis purpose, and generates a sequence of OpenRefine operations designed to produce a minimal, clean table sufficient to address the purpose. Six operations address common data quality issues including format inconsistencies, type errors, and duplicates.To evaluate AutoDCWorkflow, we create a benchmark with metrics assessing answers, data, and workflow quality for 142 purposes using 96 tables across six topics. The evaluation covers three key dimensions: (1) **Purpose Answer**: can the cleaned table produce a correct answer? (2) **Column (Value)**: how closely does it match the ground truth table? (3) **Workflow (Operations)**: to what extent does the generated workflow resemble the human-curated ground truth? Experiments show that Llama 3.1, Mistral, and Gemma 2 significantly enhance data quality, outperforming the baseline across all metrics. Gemma 2-27B consistently generates high-quality tables and answers, while Gemma 2-9B excels in producing workflows that resemble human annotations.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T AutoDCWorkflow: LLM-based Data Cleaning Workflow Auto-Generation and Benchmark
%A Li, Lan
%A Fang, Liri
%A Ludäscher, Bertram
%A Torvik, Vetle I.
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-335-7
%F li-etal-2025-autodcworkflow
%X Data cleaning is a time-consuming and error-prone manual process even with modern workflow tools like OpenRefine. Here, we present AutoDCWorkflow, an LLM-based pipeline for automatically generating data-cleaning workflows. The pipeline takes a raw table coupled with a data analysis purpose, and generates a sequence of OpenRefine operations designed to produce a minimal, clean table sufficient to address the purpose. Six operations address common data quality issues including format inconsistencies, type errors, and duplicates.To evaluate AutoDCWorkflow, we create a benchmark with metrics assessing answers, data, and workflow quality for 142 purposes using 96 tables across six topics. The evaluation covers three key dimensions: (1) **Purpose Answer**: can the cleaned table produce a correct answer? (2) **Column (Value)**: how closely does it match the ground truth table? (3) **Workflow (Operations)**: to what extent does the generated workflow resemble the human-curated ground truth? Experiments show that Llama 3.1, Mistral, and Gemma 2 significantly enhance data quality, outperforming the baseline across all metrics. Gemma 2-27B consistently generates high-quality tables and answers, while Gemma 2-9B excels in producing workflows that resemble human annotations.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.410
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.410/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.410
%P 7766-7780
Markdown (Informal)
[AutoDCWorkflow: LLM-based Data Cleaning Workflow Auto-Generation and Benchmark](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.410/) (Li et al., Findings 2025)
ACL