Service Discovery Method Based on User Intent

This paper introduces a method that supports a user who has only a vague idea of service use in discovering suitable mobile applications. The proposal allows the user to add application functions after selecting the purpose of service use from a list of novel application functions. The proposal is based on our concept of ISHI (Intent of Service and Human Interface) which works as an interface between service and user. ISHI can automatically determine the importance level and the novelty level of an application from various data. The proposed method is based on not only natural language but also the structured data of mobile applications. User experiments show that the proposed method yields, compared to the conventional method, better performance with respect to the time duration of application search and the frequency of recourse to new service functions.