Thesis committee:
In this research, we address the problem of retrieving services which fulfil users' need expressed in query in free text. Our goal is to cope the term mismatch problems which affect the effectiveness of service retrieval models applied in prior research on text descriptions-based service retrieval models. These problems are caused due to service descriptions are brief. Service providers use few terms to describe desired services, thereby, when these descriptions are different to the sentences in queries, term mismatch problems decrease the effectiveness in classical models which depend on the observable text features instead of the latent semantic features of the text.
We have applied a family of Information Retrieval (IR) models for the purpose of contributing to increase the effectiveness acquired with the models applied in prior research on service retrieval. Besides, we have conducted systematic experiments to compare our family of IR models with those used in the state-of-the-art in service discovery. From the outcomes of the experiments, we conclude that our model based on query expansion via a co-occurrence thesaurus outperforms the effectiveness of all the models studied in this research. Therefore, we have implemented this model in S3niffer, which is a text description-based service search engine.