TCL: Trustworthy Contrastive Learning for Web API Recommendation via Exploring Textual and Structural Semantics

With the development of service-oriented computing, software developers increasingly rely on diverse Web application programming interfaces (APIs, also known as Web services) from unmanned Web API markets. This trend aims to expedite the development of feature-rich Mashup applications while simultaneously reducing time and costs. However, the growing abundance of Web APIs presents a challenge in service discovery. Consequently, Web API recommendation is proposed as a vital strategy for facilitating service discovery. Nonetheless, existing approaches to Web API recommendation suffer from limitations in effectively extracting rich semantics from description documents and service networks, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. To address this issue, this article proposes trustworthy contrastive learning (TCL) for Web API recommendation via exploring textual and structural semantics, named TCL. TCL takes the trustworthiness of both the textual and structural representations into account to differentiate the loss of contrastive learning so that both textual and structural representation learning can be mutually improved. Empirical evaluations conducted on a real-world dataset crawled from ProgrammableWeb.com demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showcasing its superiority over baseline methods.