Techniques are disclosed which provide for transforming a hierarchical table to a relational table. A hierarchical table may be received, in which a headline row is identified. A candidate row may be determined in the hierarchical table. The process may include systematically classifying headlines as data headlines or descriptors. For each data headline a new column may be generated, while for each descriptor headline, the table may be split to produce a resultant table. The resultant table may be stored and the process may be repeated until there are no headlines left to be classified. The steps performed by the system to transform the table can then be displayed on a user device using a program in the Domain-specific language, which can then be further inspected or modified to perform the desired table transformation.