{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/infere-step-by-step-regex-generation-via","title":"InfeRE: Step-by-Step Regex Generation via Chain of Inference","arxiv_id":"2308.04041","date":"2023-08-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shuai Zhang","Xiaodong Gu","Yuting Chen","Beijun Shen"],"abstract":"Automatically generating regular expressions (abbrev. regexes) from natural language description (NL2RE) has been an emerging research area. Prior studies treat regex as a linear sequence of tokens and generate the final expressions autoregressively in a single pass. They did not take into account the step-by-step internal text-matching processes behind the final results. This significantly hinders the efficacy and interpretability of regex generation by neural language models. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm called InfeRE, which decomposes the generation of regexes into chains of step-by-step inference. To enhance the robustness, we introduce a self-consistency decoding mechanism that ensembles multiple outputs sampled from different models. We evaluate InfeRE on two publicly available datasets, NL-RX-Turk and KB13, and compare the results with state-of-the-art approaches and the popular tree-based generation approach TRANX. Experimental results show that InfeRE substantially outperforms previous baselines, yielding 16.3% and 14.7% improvement in DFA@5 accuracy on two datasets, respectively. Particularly, InfeRE outperforms the popular tree-based generation approach by 18.1% and 11.3% on both datasets, respectively, in terms of DFA@5 accuracy.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04041v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.04041v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"infere-step-by-step-regex-generation-via","repo_url":"https://github.com/smallqqqq/infere","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"text-matching","task_name":"Text Matching"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}