Automatic regex synthesis methods for english: a comparative analysis

Regular expressions (short form regex) find their application in program script synthesis, machine translation, information extraction and web applications, such as input validations. Their expressiveness and flexibility make them decidedly the best tool for many challenging text extraction tasks. Writing regex manually has been labeled as a laborious, time consuming and error prone task even for skilled programmers. An abundance of regex generation from text queries at online platforms mainly Stackoverflow and Quora signifies the automatic regex synthesis problem. Despite their popularity, a criminal lack of comprehensive literature study on the problem has also been observed. We intend to perform a detailed review of a variety of methods available for regex synthesis, repair, and learn beneficial lessons for appropriate datasets with one earnest goal: to synthesize resource efficient and correct regexes for given textual description.