Evolving XSLT stylesheets

TL;DR

This paper presents a genetic programming approach to automatically evolve XSLT stylesheets for XML document transformation, comparing different representations to optimize performance and success rate.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method using genetic programming with tree-based representations to evolve XSLT stylesheets efficiently.

Findings

Different representations impact performance and success.

The method can generate effective XSLT stylesheets within reasonable time.

Tree-based genetic programming is suitable for evolving document transformation stylesheets.

Abstract

This paper introduces a procedure based on genetic programming to evolve XSLT programs (usually called stylesheets or logicsheets). XSLT is a general purpose, document-oriented functional language, generally used to transform XML documents (or, in general, solve any problem that can be coded as an XML document). The proposed solution uses a tree representation for the stylesheets as well as diverse specific operators in order to obtain, in the studied cases and a reasonable time, a XSLT stylesheet that performs the transformation. Several types of representation have been compared, resulting in different performance and degree of success.