Can an LLM find its way around a Spreadsheet?

Spreadsheets are routinely used in business and scientific contexts, and one of the most vexing challenges data analysts face is performing data cleaning prior to analysis and evaluation. The ad-hoc and arbitrary nature of data cleaning problems, such as typos, inconsistent formatting, missing values, and a lack of standardization, often creates the need for highly specialized pipelines. We ask whether an LLM can find its way around a spreadsheet and how to support end-users in taking their free-form data processing requests to fruition. Just like RAG retrieves context to answer users' queries, we demonstrate how we can retrieve elements from a code library to compose data processing pipelines. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the quality of our system and how it is able to continuously augment its vocabulary by saving new codes and pipelines back to the code library for future retrieval.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science & Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science and#38; Applications

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Cho Ting

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Ramakrishnan, Narendran

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Simeone, John
• Lu, Chang Tien

• LLMs
• data cleaning
• end-user programming

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:40725

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/119304