Semantic similarity based context-aware web service discovery using NLP techniques

Abstract

Due to the high availability and also the distributed nature of published web services on the Web, efficient discovery and retrieval of relevant services that meet user requirements can be a challenging task. In this paper, we present a semantics based web service retrieval framework that uses natural language processing techniques to extract a service’s functional information. The extracted information is used to compute the similarity between any given service pair, for generating additional metadata for each service and for classifying the services based on their functional similarity. The framework also adds natural language querying capabilities for supporting exact and approximate matching of relevant services to a given user query. We present experimental results that show that the semantic analysis & automatic tagging effectively captured the inherent functional details of a service and also the similarity between different services. Also, a significant improvement in precision and recall was observed during Web service retrieval when compared to simple keyword matching search, using the natural language querying interface provided by the proposed framework. © Rinton Press.