Mining User Intents to Compose Services for End-Users

End-users repetitively perform various on-line tasks and invoke multiple web services for their re-occurring activities, such as planning a trip. Usually, end-users have to complete different tasks in order to achieve a goal, and look through large volumes of services to find the best ones that satisfy their constraints, such as a budget limit. Current approaches on service composition require programming skills and domain knowledge to accomplish goals. Moreover, existing approaches lack an automatic way to analyze end-users' goals and extract relevant tasks for achieving goals. In this paper, we provide a lightweight service composition framework for end-users with limited technical background. Our framework analyzes endusers' goals expressed in natural languages to mine tasks (e.g., plan a trip) and non-functional constraints (e.g., budget <; 500). Our framework extracts task models from textual descriptions of tasks (e.g., eHow, a How-to instruction website) to guide the selection of services and recommend web services that can finish tasks and satisfy constraints. We have designed and developed a prototype as a proof of concept. We conduct case studies to evaluate the effectiveness of our framework. Our framework can identify tasks with a precision of 93% and a recall of 77%, and extract non-functional constraints with a precision of 89% and a recall of 76%. A user study shows that our framework is helpful for end-users to compose services.