Constructing composite web services from natural language requests

Abstract

As a demand on composite Web services increases, there is a growing interest in a convenient access to them. This paper proposes a natural language interface to Web services, which can be used even by a novice user who does not know Web service technologies. Given a user's natural language request to a composite service, the proposed method generates an abstract workflow, which describes the constituent tasks and their transitions in a composite service. Specifically, the proposed method constructs a sophisticated abstract workflow from complex sentences with phrases and control constructs. Experimental results with a variety of natural language requests show that the proposed method successfully extracts abstract workflows, resulting in an accuracy of 95.2%. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.