xServeNet: An Explainable Deep Neural Network for Web Services Classification

Web service classification plays an important role in software reuse, service discovery, and automatic metadata organization. Although recent deep learning approaches have improved classification performance by using service names and natural-language descriptions, most existing methods still operate as black-box models and offer limited insight into how different metadata sources influence classification decisions. This lack of transparency reduces their practical usefulness for developers who need to verify predicted categories, analyze incorrect classifications, and improve service metadata quality. A well-trained interpretable model can not only help developers choose more appropriate and reliable categories for each web service, but also help write a more reasonable service name and description. In this paper, we present xServeNet, an explainability-oriented extension of ServeNet for transparent web service classification. xServeNet preserves the BERT-based representation and CNN–BiLSTM feature extractor of ServeNet and introduces (i) an instance-wise dynamic source-fusion mechanism that adaptively combines service-name and service-description features according to their semantic contribution, and (ii) model-internal importance indicators at both the source and word levels that support inspection of classification decisions without introducing additional trainable parameters. We benchmark xServeNet against eleven machine learning baselines on two real-world ProgrammableWeb datasets of 10,943 and 14,086 services covering 50 categories. xServeNet reaches 71.08% Top-1/91.35% Top-5 accuracy on the original dataset and 74.10% Top-1/92.95% Top-5 accuracy on the updated dataset, consistently improving Top-1 accuracy over ServeNet while remaining competitive on Top-5, and achieving the lowest per-category Top-5 standard deviation among all twelve compared methods. In practice, the importance indicators support three concrete activities at the service registry: helping developers verify predicted categories at registration time, iterating on description wording when the predicted category looks wrong, and supporting registry curators in flagging likely mislabelled services for review.