Inferring Restricted Regular Expressions with Interleaving from Positive and Negative Samples

Abstract

The presence of a schema for XML documents has numerous advantages. Unfortunately, many XML documents in practice are not accompanied by a schema or a valid schema. Therefore, it is essential to devise algorithms to infer schemas. The fundamental task in XML schema inference is to learn regular expressions. In this paper, we focus on learning the subclass of RE(&) called SIREs (the subclass of regular expressions with interleaving). Previous work in this direction lacks inference algorithms that support inference from positive and negative examples. We provide an algorithm to learn SIREs from positive and negative examples based on genetic algorithms and parallel techniques. Our algorithm also has better expansibility, which means that our algorithm not only supports learning with positive and negative examples, but also supports learning with positive or negative examples only. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.