bi-directional Bayesian probabilistic model based hybrid grained semantic matchmaking for Web service discovery

Web service discovery is a fundamental task in service-oriented architectures which searches for suitable web services based on users’ goals and preferences. In this paper, we present a novel service discovery approach that can support user queries with various-size-grained text elements. Compared with existing approaches that only support semantics matchmaking in single texture granularity (either word level or paragraph level), our approach enables the requester to search for services with any type of query content with high performance, including word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph. Specifically, we present an unsupervised Bayesian probabilistic model, bi-Directional Sentence-Word Topic Model (bi-SWTM), to achieve semantic matchmaking between possible textual types of queries (word, phrase, sentence, paragraph) and the texts in web service descriptions, by mapping words and sentences in the same semantic space. The bi-SWTM captures textual semantics of the words and sentences in a probabilistic simplex, which provides a flexible method to build the semantic links from user queries to service descriptions. The novel approach is validated using a collection of comprehensive experiments on ProgrammableWeb data. The results demonstrate that the bi-SWTM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on service discovery and classification. The visualization of the nearest-neighbored queries and descriptions shows the capability of our model on capturing the latent semantics of web services.