@inproceedings{qin-etal-2025-maps,
    title = "{MAPS}: Motivation-Aware Personalized Search via {LLM}-Driven Consultation Alignment",
    author = "Qin, Weicong  and
      Xu, Yi  and
      Yu, Weijie  and
      Shen, Chenglei  and
      He, Ming  and
      Fan, Jianping  and
      Zhang, Xiao  and
      Xu, Jun",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.152/",
    pages = "3039--3051",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "Personalized product search aims to retrieve and rank items that match users' preferences and search intent. Despite their effectiveness, existing approaches typically assume that users' query fully captures their real motivation. However, our analysis of a real-world e-commerce platform reveals that users often engage in relevant consultations before searching, indicating they refine intents through consultations based on motivation and need. The implied motivation in consultations is a key enhancing factor for personalized search. This unexplored area comes with new challenges including aligning contextual motivations with concise queries, bridging the category-text gap, and filtering noise within sequence history. To address these, we propose a Motivation-Aware Personalized Search (MAPS) method. It embeds queries and consultations into a unified semantic space via LLMs, utilizes a Mixture of Attention Experts (MoAE) to prioritize critical semantics, and introduces dual alignment: (1) contrastive learning aligns consultations, reviews, and product features; (2) bidirectional attention integrates motivation-aware embeddings with user preferences. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data show MAPS outperforms existing methods in both retrieval and ranking tasks. Code and supplementary materials are available at: https://github.com/E-qin/MAPS."
}