Can a Machine Replace Humans in Building Regular Expressions? A Case Study

Regular expressions are routinely used in a variety of different application domains. But building a regular expression involves a considerable amount of skill, expertise, and creativity. In this work, the authors investigate whether a machine can surrogate these qualities and automatically construc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE intelligent systems 2016-11, Vol.31 (6), p.15-21
Main Authors: Bartoli, Alberto, De Lorenzo, Andrea, Medvet, Eric, Tarlao, Fabiano
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial intelligence
automatic
Complexity theory
Creativity
Domains
Genetic algorithms
Genetic programming
Human factors
Human-computer interaction
intelligent systems
Mathematical programming
Object recognition
Pattern matching
regular expressions
Speech processing
Task complexity
User groups
User requirements
Web pages
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Summary:Regular expressions are routinely used in a variety of different application domains. But building a regular expression involves a considerable amount of skill, expertise, and creativity. In this work, the authors investigate whether a machine can surrogate these qualities and automatically construct regular expressions for tasks of realistic complexity. They discuss a large-scale experiment involving more than 1,700 users on 10 challenging tasks. The authors compare the solutions constructed by these users to those constructed by a tool based on genetic programming that they recently developed and made publicly available. The quality of automatically constructed solutions turned out to be similar to the quality of those constructed by the most skilled user group; the time for automatic construction was likewise similar to the time required by human users.
ISSN:1541-1672
1941-1294
DOI:10.1109/MIS.2016.46