Question selection for interactive program synthesis

Abstract

Interactive program synthesis aims to solve the ambiguity in specifications, and selecting the proper question to minimize the rounds of interactions is critical to the performance of interactive program synthesis. In this paper we address this question selection problem and propose two algorithms. SampleSy approximates a state-of-the-art strategy proposed for optimal decision tree and has a short response time to enable interaction. EpsSy further reduces the rounds of interactions by approximating SampleSy with a bounded error rate. To implement the two algorithms, we further propose VSampler, an approach to sampling programs from a probabilistic context-free grammar based on version space algebra. The evaluation shows the effectiveness of both algorithms.