Multi-Layer Web Services Discovery Using Word Embedding and Clustering Techniques

We propose a multi-layer data mining architecture for web services discovery using word embedding and clustering techniques to improve the web service discovery process. The proposed architecture consists of five layers: web services description and data preprocessing; word embedding and representation; syntactic similarity; semantic similarity; and clustering. In the first layer, we identify the steps to parse and preprocess the web services documents. In the second layer, Bag of Words with Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and three word-embedding models are employed for web services representation. In the third layer, four distance measures, namely, Cosine, Euclidean, Minkowski, and Word Mover, are considered to find the similarities between Web services documents. In layer four, WordNet and Normalized Google Distance are employed to represent and find the similarity between web services documents. Finally, in the fifth layer, three clustering algorithms, namely, affinity propagation, K-means, and hierarchical agglomerative clustering, are investigated for clustering of web services based on observed similarities in documents. We demonstrate how each component of the five layers is employed in web services clustering using randomly selected web services documents. We conduct experimental analysis to cluster web services using a collected dataset consisting of web services documents and evaluate their clustering performances. Using a ground truth for evaluation purposes, we observe that clusters built based on the word embedding models performed better than those built using the Bag of Words with Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency model. Among the three word embedding models, the pre-trained Word2Vec’s skip-gram model reported higher performance in clustering web services. Among the three semantic similarity measures, path-based WordNet similarity reported higher clustering performance. By considering the different word representations models and syntactic and semantic similarity measures, we found that the affinity propagation clustering technique performed better in discovering similarities among Web services.