API Recommendation Research Articles

A lightweight API recommendation method for App development based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

A lightweight API recommendation method for App development based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

Diversity-driven automated web API recommendation based on implicit requirements

With the rapid growth of the web API sharing community, Mashup development has become a popular way for software developers to quickly create Mashup applications. Mashup development allows developers to quickly implement the functionality they want by combining a chosen set of web APIs, which greatly improves development efficiency. However, the existence of numerous web API candidates make it difficult to select the appropriate API quickly. Most existing automated web API recommendation approaches focus on the developer’s description of requirements but typically overestimate the developer’s ability to fully describe their application’s requirements, thus ignoring their implicit and diversified functional requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel automated approach called DI-RAR to retrieve and recommend web API groups for Mashup creation. Specifically, we formulate an automated web API recommendation task as a nondeterministic polynomial problem. First, a self-attention model assigns weights to query to distinguish the core and non-core requirements. then Dynamic planning retrieval generates steiner trees to retrieve API groups and uncovers strongly related implicit requirements to enrich the mashup’s functions. Finally we apply simhash technique to filter similar results and finally provide diverse API groups. experiments based on a real-world dataset are performed to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of DI-RAR.

APIRO: A Framework for Automated Security Tools API Recommendation

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms integrate and orchestrate a wide variety of security tools to accelerate the operational activities of Security Operation Center (SOC). Integration of security tools in a SOAR platform is mostly done manually using APIs, plugins, and scripts. SOC teams need to navigate through API calls of different security tools to find a suitable API to define or update an incident response action. Analyzing various types of API documentation with diverse API format and presentation structure involves significant challenges such as data availability, data heterogeneity, and semantic variation for automatic identification of security tool APIs specific to a particular task. Given these challenges can have negative impact on SOC team’s ability to handle security incident effectively and efficiently, we consider it important to devise suitable automated support solutions to address these challenges. We propose a novel learning-based framework for automated security tool API R ecommendation for security O rchestration, automation, and response, APIRO . To mitigate data availability constraint, APIRO enriches security tool API description by applying a wide variety of data augmentation techniques. To learn data heterogeneity of the security tools and semantic variation in API descriptions, APIRO consists of an API-specific word embedding model and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that are used for prediction of top three relevant APIs for a task. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of APIRO in recommending APIs for different tasks using three security tools and 36 augmentation techniques. Our experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of APIRO for achieving 91.9% Top-1 Accuracy. Compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, APIRO is 26.93%, 23.03%, and 20.87% improved in terms of Top-1, Top-2, and Top-3 Accuracy and outperforms the baseline by 23.7% in terms of Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR).

Prophecy of Cutting Transport Ratio through a Relationship between Equivalent Circulating Density and Drilled Solid Concentration

This manuscript aimed to propose a new approach in estimating the cutting transport ratio through a relationship between equivalent circulating density (ECD) and drilled solid concentration from different formations in a nearly vertical well. A laboratory test utilising drilled cuttings from North Kuwait Field was conducted to simulate drilled solids-laden mud for accomplishing this purpose. The drilled solids were taken from four formations, namely Radhuma, Tayarat, Hartha and Sadi. The rheological behaviour of the drilled solids-laden mud was conducted according to API Recommended Practice 13B. In addition to laboratory tests, a database was established from drilled solids produced in the three wells of the North Kuwait field. As a result of the laboratory tests and actual field data, new empirical equation between drilled solid concentration and equivalent circulating density was proposed. ECD from laboratory works matched with the ECD field at an R2 value of 0.93, proving the data’s reliability. This empirical equation can be used to calculate the cutting transport ratio and later can be used to optimise drilling operations.

Assessing User Interest in Web API Recommendation using Deep Learning Probabilistic Matrix Factorization

Internet 2.0 Things connected to the Internet not only manage data supply through devices but also control the commands that flow through it. The communication technology created by the desired sensor is used by a new computing model so that the collected data appears in Web 2.0 for management. In addition to enhancing Sense efficiency through the simple IoT computing process, it is used in many cases for example video surveillance, and improved and intelligent manufacturing. Every fragment of the system is carefully continued and supervised in this process by software collection using a large number of recurs. An important process for this is to access web APIs from various public platforms in an efficient way. The use of different APIs by developers for the integration of different IoT devices and the deployment process required for this is unnecessary. Obtaining configured target APIs makes it easy to know where and how to get started with the workflow approach. Rapid industrial development can be achieved through this powerful API approach. But finding adequately powerful APIs from a large number of APIs has become a great challenge. However, due to the massive spike in the count of APIs, combining the two APIs has now become a major challenge. In this paper, for the time being, only the relationships between users and the API are considered. In this case, they had to face difficulties in extracting contextual value from their interpretation. So better accuracy could not be obtained due to this. The consequence of the user's time aspect on the cryptographic properties concerning the information collected from the API contextual description can be enhanced by the Deep Learning Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (DL-PMF) method, which improves the accuracy of the API recommendation in considering the cryptographic features of the user in the API recommendation. In this paper, we have used CNN (Convulsive Neural Network) for web elements such as APIs, and LSTM (Long-Term and Short-Term Memory) Network, which works with a diligent mechanism to find hidden features, to find hidden features that suit the tastes of the users. In conclusion, the combination of PMF (Probabilistic Matrix Factorization) evaluation of the recommended results was obtained as described above. The combination of DL-PMF method experimental results was found to be better than previous PMF, ConvMF, and other methods, thus improving the recommended accuracy.

APIMatchmaker: Matching the Right APIs for Supporting the Development of Android Apps

Android developers are often faced with the need to learn how to use different APIs suitable for their projects. Automated API recommendation approaches have been invented to help fill this gap, and these have been demonstrated to be useful to some extent. Unfortunately, most state-of-the-art works are not proposed for Android developers, and the ones dedicated to Android app development often suffer from high redundancy and poor run-time performance, or do not target the problem of recommending API usage patterns. To address this gap we propose to the community a new tool, namely <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">APIMatchmaker</i> , to recommend API usages by learning directly from similar real-world Android apps. Unlike existing recommendation approaches, which leverage a single context to find similar projects, we innovatively introduce a multi-dimensional, context-aware, collaborative filtering approach to better achieve the purpose. Specifically, in addition to code similarity, we also take app descriptions (or topics) into consideration to ensure that similar apps also provide similar functions. We evaluate <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">APIMatchmaker</i> on a large number of real-world Android apps and observe that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">APIMatchmaker</i> yields a high success rate in recommending APIs for Android apps under development, and it is also able to outperform the state-of-the-art.

Web API Recommendation Based on Self-Attentional Neural Factorization Machines With Domain Interactions

With the advances of service computing technology, there has been a significant focus on enhancing the relevance or accuracy of Web API recommendation for Mashup creation. In the multiple established works, factorization machines based models portray increased performance compared with traditional content or collaborative filtering techniques with regard to accuracy, which still has great room for improvement. Thus, this article takes a further step to propose a more expressive factorization machines model, i.e., Self-Attentional Neural Factorization Machines with Domain Interactions for Web API recommendation. Specifically, we introduce the concept of domain interaction to reduce the calculation complexity and capture the common characteristics of all features in one domain. Then, we leverage an implicit attention mechanism, that is, self-attention, to identify the importance of different feature interactions, instead of using explicit attention. Moreover, to promote expressive capability, deep neural networks are integrated into the transformed feature interactions following the self-attention propagation, capturing low and high order representations. In this approach, the importance of feature interactions can contribute to both low and high order relations. Multiple studies on a practical dataset indicates the inherent benefits of the method proposed in this study over the baselines for Web API recommendation.

Fitting missing API puzzles with machine translation techniques

While implementing software projects, developers do not reinvent the wheel but try to reuse existing API calls and source code. In recent years, the problems related to recommending APIs and code snippets have been intensively investigated. Although current approaches have achieved encouraging performance, there is still the need to improve the recommendation process’s effectiveness and efficiency. In this work, we reformulate the problem of API recommendations by proposing learning and recommending API sequences relevant to a given coding context. We present LUPE, a novel approach to API and code recommendation, exploiting cutting-edge deep learning techniques. Thanks to the underlying Encoder–Decoder architecture specialized in transforming sequences, LUPE can effectively learn the order in which invocations occur. The approach has been evaluated on two Android datasets and compared with GAPI and FACER, two state-of-the-art API recommender systems. Being fed with augmented training data, our conceived approach can obtain a high prediction accuracy, and produce a perfect match in several cases, hence outperforming the baselines.

Web APIs recommendation with neural content embedding for mobile multimedia computing

Web APIs recommendation with neural content embedding for mobile multimedia computing

APIGAN: Learning to Recommend Java API in Real-Time Using Generative Adversarial Networks

In order to improve the accuracy of API recommendations, this paper proposes a novel API recommendation approach of APIGAN fully leveraging structural and textual information based on Generative Adversarial Networks, in which a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is used as a generator while a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used as a discriminator. The structural and semantic information of a source code extracted from an abstract syntax tree is used to construct a program dependence graph (PDG) which is also the input of the generator and the discriminator. By evaluating the difference in outputs of them, LSTM is evolved gradually till an optimized program dependence network is obtained to recommend top-k APIs. The results of the experiments show that APIGAN outperforms state-of-the-art research such as APIREC, GraLan, and n-gram in the aspect of top-k accuracy.

Mashup-Oriented Web API Recommendation via Multi-Model Fusion and Multi-Task Learning

As the number of Web APIs ever increases, choosing the appropriate APIs for mashup creations becomes more difficult. To tackle this problem, various methods have been proposed to recommend APIs to match requirements of mashups and achieved much success. However, there existed some challenges with feature fusion and utilization, textual requirement understanding, utilization of Mashup categories and compatibility evaluation. Therefore, we propose a neural framework (MTFM) based on multi-model fusion and multi-task learning for Mashup-oriented Web API recommendation. MTFM exploits a semantic component to generate representations of requirements and introduces a feature interaction component to model the feature interaction between mashups and Web APIs. Output features of both components are further fused to predict the candidate APIs, and this enables us to have both the advantages of content-based and collaborative filtering methods. We further introduce mashup category judgment as an auxiliary task, where both tasks are viewed as a multi-label learning problem and jointly optimized with multi-task learning. Also, we have extended MTFM to MTFM++ to take advantage of the metadata and quality features of APIs, and proposed a metric for compatibility evaluation. Experimental results on the ProgrammableWeb dataset show that our methods outperform most popular state-of-the-art methods.

Post2Vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Stack Overflow Posts

Past studies have proposed solutions that analyze Stack Overflow content to help users find desired information or aid various downstream software engineering tasks. A common step performed by those solutions is to extract suitable representations of posts; typically, in the form of meaningful vectors. These vectors are then used for different tasks, for example, tag recommendation, relatedness prediction, post classification, and API recommendation. Intuitively, the quality of the vector representations of posts determines the effectiveness of the solutions in performing the respective tasks. In this work, to aid existing studies that analyze Stack Overflow posts, we propose a specialized deep learning architecture Post2Vec which extracts distributed representations of Stack Overflow posts. Post2Vec is aware of different types of content present in Stack Overflow posts, i.e., title, description, and code snippets, and integrates them seamlessly to learn post representations. Tags provided by Stack Overflow users that serve as a common vocabulary that captures the semantics of posts are used to guide Post2Vec in its task. To evaluate the quality of Post2Vec's deep learning architecture, we first investigate its end-to-end effectiveness in tag recommendation task. The results are compared to those of state-of-the-art tag recommendation approaches that also employ deep neural networks. We observe that Post2Vec achieves 15-25 percent improvement in terms of F1-score@5 at a lower computational cost. Moreover, to evaluate the value of representations learned by Post2Vec, we use them for three other tasks, i.e., relatedness prediction, post classification, and API recommendation. We demonstrate that the representations can be used to boost the effectiveness of state-of-the-art solutions for the three tasks by substantial margins (by 10, 7, and 10 percent in terms of F1-score, F1-score, and correctness, respectively). We release our replication package at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/maxxbw/Post2Vec</uri> .

Holistic Combination of Structural and Textual Code Information for Context Based API Recommendation

Context based API recommendation is an important way to help developers find the needed APIs effectively and efficiently. For effective API recommendation, we need not only a joint view of both structural and textual code information, but also a holistic view of correlated API usage in control and data flow graph as a whole. Unfortunately, existing API recommendation methods exploit structural or textual code information separately. In this work, we propose a novel API recommendation approach called APIRec-CST (API Recommendation by Combining Structural and Textual code information). APIRec-CST is a deep learning model that combines the API usage with the text information in the source code based on an API Context Graph Network and a Code Token Network that simultaneously learn structural and textual features for API recommendation. We apply APIRec-CST to train a model for JDK library based on 1,914 open-source Java projects and evaluate the accuracy and MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank) of API recommendation with another 6 open-source projects. The results show that our approach achieves respectively a top-1, top-5, top-10 accuracy and MRR of 60.3, 81.5, 87.7 and 69.4 percent, and significantly outperforms an existing graph-based statistical approach and a tree-based deep learning approach for API recommendation. A further analysis shows that textual code information makes sense and improves the accuracy and MRR. The sensitivity analysis shows that the top-k accuracy and MRR of APIRec-CST are insensitive to the number of APIs to be recommended in a hole. We also conduct a user study in which two groups of students are asked to finish 6 programming tasks with or without our APIRec-CST plugin. The results show that APIRec-CST can help the students to finish the tasks faster and more accurately and the feedback on the usability is overwhelmingly positive.

Sequence-Aware API Recommendation Based on Collaborative Filtering

API recommendation is crucial to improve programmers’ productivity. A lot of work has been proposed to improve the accuracy of API recommendations. In the existing work, many metrics, such as Precision, Recall, and MAP are used to evaluate the accuracy of the recommendation. These metrics can well reflect the ability to distinguish useful APIs from the candidate set, but they cannot evaluate the ability to determine the priority of useful APIs with each other. The priority between related APIs directly determines whether the recommended results are practical for developers. From this perspective, inspired by the sequence-aware recommendation, this paper constructs an API recommendation method with sequence awareness and designs new metrics to evaluate the method’s ability to determine the priority of useful APIs. The experimental results show that, compared with the baseline, the proposed method not only achieves better results on the common widely-used metrics but also outperforms the baseline method concerning the newly proposed sequence metrics.

API Recommendation Based on WII-WMD

Improving software development efficiency based on existing APIs is one of the hot researches in software engineering. Understanding and learning so many APIs in large software libraries is not easy and software developers prefer to provide only requirements descriptions to get the right API. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes an API recommendation method based on WII-WMD, an improved similarity calculation algorithm. This method firstly structures the text, and then fully mines the semantic information in the text. Finally, it calculates the similarity between the user's query problem and the information described in the API document. The experiment results show that the API recommendation based on WII-WMD can improve the efficiency of the API recommendation system.

Web API recommendation via combining graph attention representation and deep factorization machines quality prediction

SUMMARYAs more and more companies and organizations encapsulate and publish their business data or resources to the Internet in the form of APIs, the number of web APIs has grown exponentially. For this reason, it has become challenging to quickly and effectively find web APIs from such a large‐scale web API collection, which meet the requirements of mashup developers. To this end, this article focuses on recommending suitable web APIs to build high‐quality mashups by classifying and integrating content‐oriented service functionality with service invocation prediction. The proposed web API recommendation method for mashup development uses graph attention representation and DeepFM quality prediction. First, it uses the web API composition and shared annotation relationships to construct a web API relationship network. Second, it applies the self‐attention mechanism to compute the attention coefficients of different neighboring nodes in the web API relationship network. So, for a specific web API node, the weighted sum of the importance of its neighboring nodes and features characterizes that web API node. Doing so ensures that the service can be divided more accurately into different functional clusters via high‐quality characterization. Third, for the web APIs in a cluster, the high‐quality representation results are combined with multidimensional quality of service attributes. It employs the DeepFM to model and mine complex interaction relationships between features and subsequently predict and rank the invocation scores of web APIs. Finally, experiments are compared and analyzed on real‐world web API datasets. It can be seen from the results of several groups of comparative experiments that the proposed method outperforms other nine baseline methods on accuracy, recall, F1, DCG, and AUC and achieved a good classification accuracy and recommendation effect.

API Recommendation for Machine Learning Libraries: How Far Are we?

API Recommendation for Machine Learning Libraries: How Far Are we?

Open APIs recommendation with an ensemble-based multi-feature model

Recommending the appropriate APIs from a large volume of Open APIs to application developers both accurately and efficiently has become a challenging problem. Established work usually takes only one feature of Open APIs into account, which decreases the accuracy of recommendations. In order to overcome this problem, we propose an ensemble-based approach to Open APIs recommendation with a multiple feature model, which integrates both machine learning and deep learning and synthesizes a set of multiple features to accurately make the recommendation. This approach employs One-hot, Word2vec similarity and Matrix Factorization techniques to obtain the multiple features information respectively, then concatenates the features to obtain a Multivariate Information Feature (MIF) matrix, and leverages an optimized Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for feature selection. GBDT is good at processing dense numerical features, while GRU is good at processing sparse categorical features, Finally, the results are synthesized to obtain a recommendation result. We have compared our approach with other four Open APIs recommendation approaches on the Programmable Web, and verified the effectiveness of our approach in precision, recall, F1-measure.

A Correlation Graph based Approach for Personalized and Compatible Web APIs Recommendation in Mobile APP Development

Using Web APIs registered in service sharing communities for mobile APP development can not only reduce development period and cost, but also fully reuse state-of-the-art research outcomes in broad domain so as to ensure up-to-date APP development and applications. However, the big volume of available APIs in Web communities as well as their differences make it difficult for APIs selection considering compatibility, preferred partial APIs and expected APIs functions which are often of high variety. Accordingly, how to recommend a set of functional-satisfactory and compatibility-optimal APIs based on the APP developer's multiple function expectation and pre-chosen partial APIs is on demand as a significant challenge for successful APP development. To address this challenge, we first construct a Web APIs correlation graph that incorporates functional descriptions and compatibility information of Web APIs, and then propose a correlation graph-based approach for personalized and compatible Web APIs recommendation in mobile APP development. Finally, through extensive experiments on a real dataset crawled from Web APIs websites, we prove the feasibility of our proposed recommendation approach.

A Lightweight Api Recommendation Method for App Development Based on Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm

A Lightweight Api Recommendation Method for App Development Based on Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm