This article represents the Replicated Computational Results (RCR) related to our TOSEM paper “A Machine Learning Approach for Automated Filling of Categorical Fields in Data Entry Forms,” where we proposed LAFF, an approach to automatically suggest possible values of categorical fields in data entry forms, which is a common user interface feature in many software systems. In this RCR report, we provide details about our replication package. We make available the different scripts needed to fully replicate the results obtained in our paper.

Data entry forms use completeness requirements to specify the fields that are required or optional to fill for collecting necessary information from different types of users. However, because of the evolving nature of software, some required fields may not be applicable for certain types of users anymore. Nevertheless, they may still be incorrectly marked as required in the form; we call such fields obsolete required fields. Since obsolete required fields usually have “not-null” validation checks before submitting the form, users have to enter meaningless values in such fields to complete the form submission. These meaningless values threaten the quality of the filled data and could negatively affect stakeholders or learning-based tools that use the data. To avoid users filling meaningless values, existing techniques usually rely on manually written rules to identify the obsolete required fields and relax their completeness requirements. However, these techniques are ineffective and costly. In this article, we propose LACQUER, a learning-based automated approach for relaxing the completeness requirements of data entry forms. LACQUER builds Bayesian Network models to automatically learn conditions under which users had to fill meaningless values. To improve its learning ability, LACQUER identifies the cases where a required field is only applicable for a small group of users and uses SMOTE, an oversampling technique, to generate more instances on such fields for effectively mining dependencies on them. During the data entry session, LACQUER predicts the completeness requirement of a target based on the already filled fields and their conditional dependencies in the trained model. Our experimental results show that LACQUER can accurately relax the completeness requirements of required fields in data entry forms with precision values ranging between 0.76 and 0.90 on different datasets. LACQUER can prevent users from filling 20% to 64% of meaningless values, with negative predictive values (i.e., the ability to correctly predict a field as “optional”) between 0.72 and 0.91. Furthermore, LACQUER is efficient; it takes at most 839 ms to predict the completeness requirement of an instance.

Users frequently interact with software systems through data entry forms. However, form filling is time-consuming and error-prone. Although several techniques have been proposed to auto-complete or pre-fill fields in the forms, they provide limited support to help users fill categorical fields, i.e., fields that require users to choose the right value among a large set of options. In this article, we propose LAFF, a learning-based automated approach for filling categorical fields in data entry forms. LAFF first builds Bayesian Network models by learning field dependencies from a set of historical input instances, representing the values of the fields that have been filled in the past. To improve its learning ability, LAFF uses local modeling to effectively mine the local dependencies of fields in a cluster of input instances. During the form filling phase, LAFF uses such models to predict possible values of a target field, based on the values in the already-filled fields of the form and their dependencies; the predicted values (endorsed based on field dependencies and prediction confidence) are then provided to the end-user as a list of suggestions. We evaluated LAFF by assessing its effectiveness and efficiency in form filling on two datasets, one of them proprietary from the banking domain. Experimental results show that LAFF is able to provide accurate suggestions with a Mean Reciprocal Rank value above 0.73. Furthermore, LAFF is efficient, requiring at most 317 ms per suggestion.