Retrieving the working modes of multifunction radar from electronic reconnaissance data is a difficult problem, and it has attracted widespread attention in the field of electronic reconnaissance. It is also an important task when extracting benefits from big electromagnetic data and provides straightforward support to applications, such as radar type recognition, working state recognition, radar intention inferring, and precise electronic jamming. Based on the assumption of model simplicity, this study defines a complexity measurement rule for multifunction radar pulse trains and introduces the semantic coding theory to analyze the temporal structure of multifunction radar pulse trains. The model complexity minimization criterion guides the semantic coding procedure to extract radar pulse groups corresponding to different radar functions from pulse trains. Furthermore, based on the coded sequence of the pulse train, the switching matrix between different pulse groups is estimated, and the hierarchical working model of multifunction radars is ultimately reconstructed. Simulations are conducted to verify the feasibility and performance of the new method. Simulation results indicate that the coding theory is successfully used in the proposed method to automatically extract pulse groups and rebuild operating models based on multifunction radar pulse trains. Moreover, the method is robust to data noises, such as missing pulses.