Paper Info
Title
Building Natural Language Interfaces to Web APIs.
Abstract
As the Web evolves towards a service-oriented architecture, application program interfaces (APIs) are becoming an increasingly important way to provide access to data, services, and devices. We study the problem of natural language interface to APIs (NL2APIs), with a focus on web APIs for web services. Such NL2APIs have many potential benefits, for example, facilitating the integration of web services into virtual assistants. We propose the first end-to-end framework to build an NL2API for a given web API. A key challenge is to collect training data, i.e., NL command-API call pairs, from which an NL2API can learn the semantic mapping from ambiguous, informal NL commands to formal API calls. We propose a novel approach to collect training data for NL2API via crowdsourcing, where crowd workers are employed to generate diversified NL commands. We optimize the crowdsourcing process to further reduce the cost. More specifically, we propose a novel hierarchical probabilistic model for the crowdsourcing process, which guides us to allocate budget to those API calls that have a high value for training NL2APIs. We apply our framework to real-world APIs, and show that it can collect high-quality training data at a low cost, and build NL2APIs with good performance from scratch. We also show that our modeling of the crowdsourcing process can improve its effectiveness, such that the training data collected via our approach leads to better performance of NL2APIs than a strong baseline.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3132847.3133009
CIKM
Keywords
Field
DocType
Natural language interface, Web API, Crowdsourcing, Hierarchical Probabilistic Model
Web API,World Wide Web,Semantic mapping,Computer science,Crowdsourcing,Web standards,Natural language user interface,Web modeling,Web service,Data access
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-4918-5
5
0.40
References 
Authors
19
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yu Su177134.45
Ahmed Hassan294357.64
Madian Khabsa323718.81
Patrick Pantel43980232.69
Michael Gamon5148489.50
Mark J. Encarnación6527.65