A General Complementary API Recommendation Framework based on Learning Model

With the advancement of service computing technology, the Internet has witnessed an exponential proliferation of Web APIs. However, the selection of suitable APIs from this vast pool for Mashup creation poses a great challenge for users. Various Web API recommendation methods have been proposed to address this issue, aiming to simplify the complex selection process. Despite these efforts, limited studies have been conducted on complementary function recommendation. In this context, a general complementary Web API recommendation framework based on a learning model, named CoWAR, is designed to recommend complementary Web APIs tailored for Mashup creation, based on the user’s selected Web APIs. Specifically, we propose a data labeling algorithm to generate the labeled dataset based on Mashup-API interactions derived from historical Mashups and Web APIs. Additionally, we employ BERT model to generate representation vectors of Web APIs based on the functionality description documents. Subsequently, we utilize SANFM (Self-Attentional Neural Factorization Machines) to train the complementary Web API recommendation model with the labeled sample dataset based on representation vectors of Web APIs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work addressing the complementary function recommendation problem with a learning model. By conducting a set of experiments over a real-world dataset, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated. The experimental results demonstrate that the learning model outperforms the traditional machine learning-based models and several deep learning-based models.