Web Service Network Embedding Based on Link Prediction and Convolutional Learning

Extensive efforts have been applied to develop efficient feature extraction algorithms, which aim to achieve optimal results in many fundamental tasks such as Web-based software service clustering, recommendation and composition. However, one common issue for existing methods is that mined features are problem dependent, causing poor generalization ability across different applications. Recent studies show that we can represent networked data (e.g., citation networks and social networks) as low-dimensional vectors with rich structure and content information preserved, which can then greatly facilitate many downstream tasks such as classification and clustering. In this article, we focus on the problem of Web service network embedding, which aims to learn low-dimensional vectors to represent services by encoding both Mashup-API composition structure and service functional content. We first propose a novel probabilistic topic model to predict potential links between Mashups and APIs in the service network. Then, we develop a Service Graph Convolutional Network (Service-GCN) to learn vector representations of services, where each service (e.g., Mashup or API) forms its representation through message passing between neighborhood services over the network. We evaluate the network embedding quality on two real-world datasets for downstream classification and clustering tasks. Experimental results show that the average performance of our method improves 20.7 percent (Micro-F1) in service classification and 19.0 percent (Accuracy) in Mashup clustering compared to the state-of-the-art, which verified the effectiveness of the proposed approach for learning vector representations of Web services.

Automated summary

This article focuses on the problem of Web service network embedding, aiming to learn low-dimensional vectors to represent services by encoding both Mashup-API composition structure and service functional content. By proposing a novel probabilistic topic model and a Service Graph Convolutional Network (Service-GCN), the method achieves improvements in downstream classification and clustering tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in service classification and Mashup clustering.