Learning Robust Models for e-Commerce Product Search

Thanh Nguyen, Nikhil Rao, Karthik Subbian


Abstract
Showing items that do not match search query intent degrades customer experience in e-commerce. These mismatches result from counterfactual biases of the ranking algorithms toward noisy behavioral signals such as clicks and purchases in the search logs. Mitigating the problem requires a large labeled dataset, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. In this paper, we develop a deep, end-to-end model that learns to effectively classify mismatches and to generate hard mismatched examples to improve the classifier. We train the model end-to-end by introducing a latent variable into the cross-entropy loss that alternates between using the real and generated samples. This not only makes the classifier more robust but also boosts the overall ranking performance. Our model achieves a relative gain compared to baselines by over 26% in F-score, and over 17% in Area Under PR curve. On live search traffic, our model gains significant improvement in multiple countries.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.614
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6861–6869
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.614
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.614
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thanh Nguyen, Nikhil Rao, and Karthik Subbian. 2020. Learning Robust Models for e-Commerce Product Search. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 6861–6869, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Robust Models for e-Commerce Product Search (Nguyen et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.acl-main.614.pdf
Dataset:
 2020.acl-main.614.Dataset.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928718