Mashup-Oriented Web API Recommendation via Multi-Model Fusion and Multi-Task Learning

As the number of Web APIs ever increases, choosing the appropriate APIs for mashup creations becomes more difficult. To tackle this problem, various methods have been proposed to recommend APIs to match requirements of mashups and achieved much success. However, there existed some challenges with feature fusion and utilization, textual requirement understanding, utilization of Mashup categories and compatibility evaluation. Therefore, we propose a neural framework (MTFM) based on multi-model fusion and multi-task learning for Mashup-oriented Web API recommendation. MTFM exploits a semantic component to generate representations of requirements and introduces a feature interaction component to model the feature interaction between mashups and Web APIs. Output features of both components are further fused to predict the candidate APIs, and this enables us to have both the advantages of content-based and collaborative filtering methods. We further introduce mashup category judgment as an auxiliary task, where both tasks are viewed as a multi-label learning problem and jointly optimized with multi-task learning. Also, we have extended MTFM to MTFM++ to take advantage of the metadata and quality features of APIs, and proposed a metric for compatibility evaluation. Experimental results on the ProgrammableWeb dataset show that our methods outperform most popular state-of-the-art methods.