{"id":1094547,"date":"2024-10-16T18:19:36","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T01:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=1094547"},"modified":"2024-10-16T18:32:43","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T01:32:43","slug":"nl2formula-generating-spreadsheet-formulas-from-natural-language-queries","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/nl2formula-generating-spreadsheet-formulas-from-natural-language-queries\/","title":{"rendered":"NL2Formula: Generating Spreadsheet Formulas from Natural Language Queries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing formulas in spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, is a widespread practice among users performing data analysis. However, crafting formulas in spreadsheets remains a tedious and error-prone task for many end-users, particularly when dealing with complex operations. To alleviate the burden associated with writing spreadsheet formulas, this paper introduces a novel benchmark task called NL2FORMULA<\/strong>, aimed at generating executable formulas grounded in a spreadsheet table, given a natural language (NL) query as input. To achieve this, we construct a comprehensive dataset consisting of 70,799 paired NL queries and corresponding spreadsheet formulas, covering 21,670 tables and 37 types of formula functions.<\/p>\n

We implement the NL2FORMULA task by providing a sequence-to-sequence baseline model called fCoder<\/strong>. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of fCoder<\/strong>, demonstrating its superior performance compared to other baseline models. Furthermore, we compare fCoder<\/strong> with an initial GPT-3.5 model (i.e., text-davinci-003). Lastly, through in-depth error analysis, we identify potential challenges in the NL2FORMULA task and advocate for further investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing formulas in spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, is a widespread practice among users performing data analysis. However, crafting formulas in spreadsheets remains a tedious and error-prone task for many end-users, particularly when dealing with complex operations. To alleviate the burden associated with writing spreadsheet formulas, this paper introduces a novel benchmark 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