Automated Construction of XSL-Templates: An Inductive Programming Approach

This work bridges the gap between fundamental research in Inductive Program Synthesis and its practical application for end user programming. It demonstrates that it is indeed feasible to automatically generate XSLT stylesheets from a few examples which define the desired input/output behaviour, using the synthesis system for recursive functional programs IGOR which is set up in a term rewriting framework. The generated XSLT stylesheets apply simple string functions on text nodes of XML documents. To provide the inductive synthesis system IGOR with appropriate I/O examples a prototypical system transforms the strings of an initial I/O pair into a list of substrings as underlying data structure. By recombining the substrings of the input strings, new possible input strings are generated, chosen and completed by the user, and transformed into a specification for IGOR. A parser finally transforms the synthesised functional program into an XSLT stylesheet.