This is where I collect and write things, mostly on art and artificial intelligence. By @vaishakbelle.
Programming or scripting languages used in real-world systems are seldom designed with a formal semantics in mind from the outset. Therefore, developing well-founded analysis tools for these systems requires reverse-engineering a formal semantics as a first step. This can take months or years of effort.
Can we (at least partially) automate this process?
In a recent OOPSLA paper, along with my collaborators James and Sandor, we look at the problem of desugaring. The idea is to learn the semantics of programming languages based a few input output pairs. not surprisingly this is demonstrated to be really hard.