Learning to detect table clones in spreadsheets

In order to speed up spreadsheet development productivity, end users can create a spreadsheet table by copying and modifying an existing one. These two tables share the similar computational semantics, and form a table clone. End users may modify the tables in a table clone, e.g., adding new rows and deleting columns, thus introducing structure changes into the table clone. Our empirical study on real-world spreadsheets shows that about 58.5% of table clones involve structure changes. However, existing table clone detection approaches in spreadsheets can only detect table clones with the same structures. Therefore, many table clones with structure changes cannot be detected.