# ReSplit: Improving the Structure of Jupyter Notebooks by Re-Splitting Their Cells

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.14825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14825/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Dec 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Do Current Language Models Support Code Intelligence for R Programming Language?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07793/) (2024)
- [Contextualized Data-Wrangling Code Generation in Computational Notebooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13551/) (2024)
- [Predicting the Understandability of Computational Notebooks through Code Metrics Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10989/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Jupyter notebooks represent a unique format for programming - a combination of code and Markdown with rich formatting, separated into individual cells. We propose to perceive a Jupyter Notebook cell as a simplified and raw version of a programming function. Similar to functions, Jupyter cells should strive to contain singular, self-contained actions. At the same time, research shows that real-world notebooks fail to do so and suffer from the lack of proper structure. To combat this, we propose ReSplit, an algorithm for an automatic re-splitting of cells in Jupyter notebooks. The algorithm analyzes definition-usage chains in the notebook and consists of two parts - merging and splitting the cells. We ran the algorithm on a large corpus of notebooks to evaluate its performance and its overall effect on notebooks, and evaluated it by human experts: we showed them several notebooks in their original and the re-split form. In 29.5% of cases, the re-split notebook was selected as the preferred way of perceiving the code. We analyze what influenced this decision and describe several individual cases in detail.