Semantic-based approach to improve the description and the discovery of Linguistic Web Services

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Abstract

This paper deals with the description and the discovery of Web Services in the linguistic information system. The previous studies have proved the lack of semantics within the descriptions of the linguistic Web Services (LingWS for short) which negatively affects the quality of their discovery. In order to overcome this problem, we propose to integrate the nonfunctional linguistic properties and their relationships inside the advertisements and to semantically annotate the several elements of the LingWS descriptions. Thus, we suggest an extension of OWL-S that promotes such a proposal. Moreover, we ensure the semantic annotation through a linguistic domain ontology that we have developed using the ISO standards of linguistic data categories (ISO 12620). This proposal is consolidated with the implementation of an editor called OWL-LingS (stands for OWL for Linguistic Services). As for the discovery task, we have extended the OWLS-MX hybrid matchmaker by integrating the nonfunctional linguistic properties within its matching algorithm. The obtained matchmaker, called OWL-LingS-MX, promotes the creation of the user requests according to the extended description of LingWS. The performance of OWL-LingS-MX matchmaker is shown through a comparison with three famous OWL-S matchmakers on the same computer. These systems are iSeM, OWLSM, and OWLS-MX.

Introduction

Nowadays, the Web services have become one of the most relevant research topics in the software engineering field. As the number of Web Services increases, the issue of selecting a desired service(s) becomes a challenging research topic. Initially, Web services were described using WSDL (Web Service Description Language). However, the lack of semantics in WSDL prevents an automatic discovery of Web services (Papazoglou et al., 2007). In order to enhance the description of the Web services, several languages and approaches, such as OWL-S (W3C, 2004), WSMO (W3C, 2004), and SAWSDL (W3C, 2007), have been proposed using semantic models (e.g., ontology).

The Linguistic Web Services (LingWS for short) are a kind of Web Services related to the linguistic information system (e.g., Part of speech Tagger, Tokenizer, Morphological analyzer). Such services are used to compose other LingWS corresponding to well-known applications such as Text Summarization, Machine Translation, and Information Retrieval (Bramantoro, March 2011).

Considering the richness of the linguistic knowledge, researchers in the Natural Language Processing (NLP for short) field have proposed many attempts to improve the description of LingWS using semantic approaches (Klein and Potter, 2004) or semantic wrappers (Ishida, 2006). Nevertheless, they did not offer the possibility to represent all the linguistic features. In fact, the LingWS׳s are characterized by several features called nonfunctional linguistic properties which are already discussed in previous works (Baklouti et al., 2012a, Baklouti et al., 2012b). The LingWS description should cover all these properties and their inter-relationships like the treatment type (analysis and/or generation), the used formalism (e.g., contextual grammar, unification grammar), the processing level (e.g., morphological, syntactic, semantic), and so on. Unfortunately, the existing semantic approaches are unable to represent this kind of properties and their relations.

As far as the LingWS discovery is concerned, Bramantoro and Ishida (2011) proposed a new technique to measure the semantic similarity between LingWS descriptions through specified concepts in an ontology. They used a domain ontology previously proposed by Hayashi (2007). However, their proposal considers only the LingWS Inputs/Outputs (I/O for short) data type which is not the unique aspect that fully characterizes a LingWS (Hayashi and Narawa, 2012). Concerning the semantic matchmakers, there are many developed tools which ensure the matching of semantic Web services but there are no tools for discovering LingWS. Therefore, it is worth suggesting an appropriate matchmaker that mainly considers the nonfunctional linguistic properties.

In this paper, we aimed to enhance the LingWS description by integrating the nonfunctional linguistic properties and their relationships while annotating both functional and nonfunctional properties using a linguistic domain ontology.

Furthermore, we sought to propose an appropriate matching algorithm in order to improve the LingWS discovery. The description and discovery of LingWS would be consolidated by implementing some appropriate tools.

As a result, the integration of the nonfunctional linguistic properties and their relationships inside the description of LingWS helped the lingware system developer to explore the required properties, notably the linguistic ones. Moreover, the evaluation of the proposed matching algorithm using the SME2 environment has improved the discovery of LingWS. The obtained discovery results showed that the proposed approach can be applied for industrial application where the LingWS are numerous and various. In this context, the highly expressive descriptions offering more selecting features ensure the efficiency of the discovery process.

The remaining of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 shows the nonfunctional linguistic properties. A comparative study between semantic approaches is provided in Section 3. Section 4, however, presents the proposed solution to enhance the description and discovery of LingWS. In Section 5, we depict the proposed solution to integrate and annotate the description elements. Then, Section 6 focuses on the LingWS discovery. Details on the implementation of the description and matching tools are discussed in Section 7. Section 8 presents the comparison experiments and analysis of the results. In Section 9, we briefly comment on some related works before drawing our conclusion in Section 10.

Section snippets

Nonfunctional linguistic properties

In general, knowledge items could be considered to describe a lingware system. In the context of LingWS, these knowledge items cover not only the service name and the functional properties but also some nonfunctional properties which are very useful to both describe and discover LingWS. These nonfunctional properties can be classified according to the processing level in the following way:

  • The Lexical Level: It is characterized by the use of lexical linguistic resources, approaches, formalisms,

Semantic approaches

To deal with the description of the Web Service issues, the software engineering domain provides several approaches that use semantic models (e.g., ontologies) to describe services. Among the well-known approaches, we can mention OWL-S (W3C, 2004), WSMO (W3C, 2004), and SAWSDL (W3C, 2007).

  • OWL-S: The OWL for Services proposes an ontology of services. It provides three essential types of knowledge about a Web Service: The first is the Profile which is used to advertise the service. The service

Approach overview

The proposed approach is shown in Fig. 1. It consists of two layers: the Description Layer that manages the description of LingWS by adding the nonfunctional linguistic properties inside the OWL-S ontology and using the linguistic domain ontology to semantically annotate both the functional and nonfunctional properties. The second is the Discovery Layer that provides an extension of the best OWL-S matchmaker to consider the nonfunctional linguistic properties in its matching algorithm. The

OWL-S extension

The aim of this section is to extend the OWL-S ontology using nonfunctional linguistic properties such as approaches, phenomena, resources, and formalisms that are relevant features in the linguistic field. It is known that the OWL-S can represent this kind of properties but it cannot: (I) classify the nonfunctional linguistic properties by category. For example, using the OWL-S model and for one LingWS, we cannot get both the processing level and its linguistic properties, such as approaches,

The OWLS-MX matchmaker

We have chosen the OWLS-MX matchmaker for many reasons. Indeed, it is available as an open source from the portal semwebcentral.org.7 In addition, it has been successfully used in many fields, such as mobile e-health systems for emergency medical assistance and repatriation planning, namely the Health-SCALLOPS system8 and the CASCOM system9 (Klusch et al., 2009). This matchmaker offers a

Implementation details

At this point, we present some implementation details about the developed tools to describe and discover the LingWS.

Evaluation environment

The Semantic Web Service Matchmaker Evaluation Environment (SME2 for short) (Klusch, 2009) is widely used to evaluate matchmakers for Semantic Web services over given test collections in terms of standard performance evaluation measures (Klusch et al., 2010). The performance of our proposal (i.e., OWL-LingS-MX) is evaluated using this environment. We have implemented an SME2 plug-in in order to evaluate it within an SME2 benchmark. To perform this evaluation, we have used our OWL-LingS editor (

Related work

To enhance the LingWS description, Klein and Potter (2004) used OWL-S approach to describe LingWS. However, this contribution proposed an annotation of I/O and ignored the nonfunctional linguistic properties (e.g., processing level, approach, and phenomenon) which are mandatory to know how the LingWS operates.

Later, Ishida (2006) proposed a wrapper around LingWS that represents the LingWS profile containing the LingWS name, type, a textual description, LingWS status, and so on. However, this

Conclusion and future work

This paper provided a solution to the problems related to the lack of semantic knowledge within the LingWS description. Indeed, we proposed an OWL-S extension to integrate the nonfunctional linguistic properties and relations between them. Besides, we developed a linguistic domain ontology using ISO standards. To ensure the LingWS description, we implemented a tool, called OWL-LingS Editor, that supports the proposed extension of OWL-S. This editor is available as an open source software at //www.redcad.org/members/nabil.baklouti/OWL-LingS-Editor

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