Example-guided synthesis of relational queries

Abstract

Program synthesis tasks are commonly specified via input-output examples. Existing enumerative techniques for such tasks are primarily guided by program syntax and only make indirect use of the examples. We identify a class of synthesis algorithms for programming-by-examples, which we call Example-Guided Synthesis (EGS), that exploits latent structure in the provided examples while generating candidate programs. We present an instance of EGS for the synthesis of relational queries and evaluate it on 86 tasks from three application domains: knowledge discovery, program analysis, and database querying. Our evaluation shows that EGS outperforms state-of-the-art synthesizers based on enumerative search, constraint solving, and hybrid techniques in terms of synthesis time, quality of synthesized programs, and ability to prove unrealizability.