Per-service supervised learning for identifying desired WoT apps from user requests in natural language

Web of Things (WoT) platforms are growing fast so as the needs for composing WoT apps more easily and efficiently. We have recently commenced the campaign to develop an interface where users can issue requests for WoT apps entirely in natural language. This requires an effort to build a system that can learn to identify relevant WoT functions that fulfill user’s requests. In our preceding work, we trained a supervised learning system with thousands of publicly-available IFTTT app recipes based on conditional random fields (CRF). However, the sub-par accuracy and excessive training time motivated us to devise a better approach. In this paper, we present a novel solution that creates a separate learning engine for each trigger service. With this approach, parallel and incremental learning becomes possible. For inference, our system first identifies the most relevant trigger service for a given user request by using an information retrieval technique. Then, the learning engine associated with the trigger service predicts the most likely pair of trigger and action functions. We expect that such two-phase inference method given parallel learning engines would improve the accuracy of identifying related WoT functions. We verify our new solution through the empirical evaluation with training and test sets sampled from a pool of refined IFTTT app recipes. We also meticulously analyze the characteristics of the recipes to find future research directions.