Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Yu Su

Ahmed Hassan Awadallah

Ryen William White

Michael Gamon

Patrick Pantel

Mark James Encarnacion

Madian Khabsa

Miaosen Wang

Representative embodiments disclose mechanisms to map natural language input to an application programming interface (API) call. The natural language input is first mapped to an API frame, which is a representation of the API call without any API call formatting. The mapping from natural language input to API frame is performed using a trained sequence to sequence neural model. The sequence to sequence neural model is decomposed into small prediction units called modules. Each module is highly specialized at predicting a pre-defined kind of sequence output. The output of the modules can be displayed in an interactive user interface that allows the user to add, remove, and/or modify the output of the individual modules. The user input can be used as further training data. The API frame is mapped to an API call using a deterministic mapping.

Natural language to API conversion

Subject matter involves using natural language to Web application program interfaces (API), which map natural language commands into API calls, or API commands. This mapping enables an average user with little or no programming expertise to access Web services that use API calls using natural language. An API schema is accessed and using a specialized grammar, with the help of application programmers, canonical commands associated with the API calls are generated. A hierarchical probabilistic distribution may be applied to a semantic mesh associated with the canonical commands to identify elements of the commands that require labeling. The identified elements may be sent to annotators, for labeling with NL phrases. Labeled elements may be applied to the semantic mesh and probabilities, or weights updated. Labeled elements may be mapped to the canonical commands with machine learning to generate a natural language to API interface. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

Natural language interface to web API

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Goleta, CA, United States of America

Yu Su