Semantic Sparse Service Discovery Using Word Embedding and Gaussian LDA

Nowadays, a growing number of web services are offered in API marketplaces browsed by service developers or third-party registries. Under this situation, API marketplaces’ users greatly rely on a search engine to find suitable web services. However, due to the fact that functional attributes of web services are usually described in short texts, the search engine-based discovery approach suffers from the semantic sparsity problem, which hinders the effect of service discovery. To address this issue, we propose a novel web service discovery approach using word embedding and Gaussian latent Dirichlet allocation (Gaussian LDA). Unlike most existing service discovery approaches, our approach first uses context information generated by word embedding to enrich the semantics of service descriptions and users’ queries. Then, the enriched service description is loaded into the Gaussian LDA model to acquire service description representation. Finally, the services are ranked by considering the relevance between the extended user’s query and service description representation. The experiments conducted on a real-world web service dataset and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior effectiveness on web service discovery.