Interpretable Program Synthesis
Tianyi Zhang, Zhiyang Chen, Yuanli Zhu, Priyan Vaithilingam, Xinyu Wang, Elena L. Glassman
CHI '21: The 2021 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Session: Engineering Interactive Applications
Abstract
Program synthesis, which generates programs based on user-provided specifications, can be obscure and brittle: users have few ways to understand and recover from synthesis failures. We propose interpretable program synthesis, a novel approach that unveils the synthesis process and enables users to monitor and guide the synthesis. We designed three representations that explain the underlying synthesis process with different levels of fidelity. We implemented an interpretable synthesizer and conducted a within-subjects study with eighteen participants on three challenging regular expression programming tasks. With interpretable synthesis, participants were able to reason about synthesis failures and strategically provide feedback, achieving a significantly higher success rate compared with a state-of-the-art synthesizer. In particular, participants with a high engagement tendency (as measured by NCS-6) preferred a deductive representation that shows the synthesis process in a search tree, while participants with a relatively low engagement tendency preferred an inductive representation that renders representative samples of programs enumerated during synthesis.
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Pre-recorded Presentations for the ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 8-13, 2021
