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Efficient Enumeration of Regular Expressions for Faster Regular Expression Synthesis

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Book cover Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA 2021)

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Abstract

We study the problem of synthesizing regular expressions from a set of positive and negative strings. The previous synthesis algorithm proposed by Lee et al. [12] relies on the best-first enumeration of regular expressions. To improve the performance of the enumeration process, we define a new normal form of regular expressions called the concise normal form which allows us to significantly reduce the search space by pruning those not in the normal form while still capturing the whole class of regular languages. We conduct experiments with two benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our synthesis algorithm based on the proposed normal form outperforms the previous algorithm in terms of runtime complexity and scalability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The OCaml implementation of AlphaRegex and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/kupl/AlphaRegexPublic.

  2. 2.

    https://pypi.org/project/xeger/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MIST) (No. 2020R1A4A3079947).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kangwon National University, 1, Gangwondaehak-gil, Chuncheon-si, Gangwon-do, South Korea

    Su-Hyeon Kim, Hyeonseung Im & Sang-Ki Ko

Authors
  1. Su-Hyeon Kim
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  2. Hyeonseung Im
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  3. Sang-Ki Ko
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sang-Ki Ko .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Sebastian Maneth

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Kim, SH., Im, H., Ko, SK. (2021). Efficient Enumeration of Regular Expressions for Faster Regular Expression Synthesis. In: Maneth, S. (eds) Implementation and Application of Automata. CIAA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12803. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79121-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79121-6_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79121-6

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