Natural language-aided conversational exploration of self-documenting application programming interfaces

1. A method for intent-based exploring a self-documenting Application Programming Interface (“API”) document, the method comprising:

receiving, by a computer, a document containing a plurality of descriptions of APIs, wherein the document is in a structured format;

generating, by the computer, a plurality of entities, wherein each entity of the plurality of entities is associated with an API definition entry of the plurality of API definition entries in the document and wherein each entity of the plurality of entities is generated by replacing the properties attribute of the API definition entry with a regex wildcard;

generating, by the computer, a plurality of intents by iterating through the plurality of entities;

generating, by the computer, a dialog by creating a plurality of phrases by iterating through the plurality of path entities in the document;

receiving, by the computer, one or more questions from a user; and

in response to the one or more questions, providing one or more conversational responses to the user by a conversational application program incorporating the plurality of entities, plurality of intents, and plurality of phrases;

thereby improving efficiency of a user interface for a software developer tool to find suitable APIs, and improving efficiency of a runtime computing environment by improving the selection of APIs which consume minimal appropriate computing and communications resources.

2. The method as set forth in claim 1 wherein the generating of a plurality of intents by iterating through a plurality of path entries in the document comprises, for each path:

retrieving operation ID values;

retrieving operation details to generate intent examples; and

creating an intent from the operation ID values and the generated intent examples.

3. The method as set forth in claim 1 wherein the generating of a dialog by creating a plurality of phrases by iterating through the plurality of path entries in the document comprises, for each path:

creating exploring API dialog nodes, and

creating calling API dialog nodes.

4. The method as set forth in claim 1 wherein the self-documenting Application Programming Interface (“API”) document comprises a document selected from the group consisting of a Swagger-compliant document and an OpenAPI-compliant document.

5. The method as set forth in claim 1 wherein the self-documenting Application Programming Interface (“API”) document comprises a REpresentational State Transfer (RESTful) application programming interface description document.

6. The method as set forth in claim 1 , wherein the regex wildcard is a synonym.