Natural Language Access to Application Programming Interfaces

Users of online services may avoid having to gain knowledge of the intricacies of specific Application Programming Interface (API) syntaxes and elements by using natural language requests which are processed to extract components of the request. The components are then used to find one or more matches of known APIs, and then at least one structured API call is constructed by mapping the request's components to the structured API call's elements. The system can then invoke the online service on behalf of the client, and return the results to the client, or it can return the constructed structured API call to the client. The known API details can be initialized and updated by ingesting the description documents for the structured APIs, and then using natural language processing to extract components from the descriptions, which can then be utilized in the matching process to further enhance the results of the tool.