  Programming by Example (PBE) targets at automatically inferring a computer
program for accomplishing a certain task from sample input and output. In this
paper, we propose a deep neural networks (DNN) based PBE model called Neural
Programming by Example (NPBE), which can learn from input-output strings and
induce programs that solve the string manipulation problems. Our NPBE model has
four neural network based components: a string encoder, an input-output
analyzer, a program generator, and a symbol selector. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of NPBE by training it end-to-end to solve some common string
manipulation problems in spreadsheet systems. The results show that our model
can induce string manipulation programs effectively. Our work is one step
towards teaching DNN to generate computer programs.
