Harnessing the Power of Large Language Model for Effective Web API Recommendation

Abstract

Various Web API Recommendation (AR) techniques have assisted developers in efficiently identifying suitable APIs for mashup creation. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), there has been increasing interest in leveraging LLMs for recommender systems. Although several approaches have attempted to utilize LLMs by framing recommendations as prompts, this approach is not ideally suited for AR due to fundamental differences in the training processes of LLMs and AR models. Consequently, it's crucial to conduct further research to identify effective applications of LLMs in AR. To this end, we propose a novel LLM-based generative solution for API Recommendation (LLMAR) that combines instruction learning of multitask and multistage Low-Rank Adaptation fine-tuning based on LLaMA models. Experimental results on the ProgrammableWeb dataset show that LLMAR significantly outperforms representative methods in regular and data-limited scenarios.