Product Question Answering in E-Commerce: A Survey

Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Qian Yu, Wai Lam


Abstract
Product question answering (PQA), aiming to automatically provide instant responses to customer’s questions in E-Commerce platforms, has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Compared with typical QA problems, PQA exhibits unique challenges such as the subjectivity and reliability of user-generated contents in E-commerce platforms. Therefore, various problem settings and novel methods have been proposed to capture these special characteristics. In this paper, we aim to systematically review existing research efforts on PQA. Specifically, we categorize PQA studies into four problem settings in terms of the form of provided answers. We analyze the pros and cons, as well as present existing datasets and evaluation protocols for each setting. We further summarize the most significant challenges that characterize PQA from general QA applications and discuss their corresponding solutions. Finally, we conclude this paper by providing the prospect on several future directions.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.667
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11951–11964
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.667
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.667
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Qian Yu, and Wai Lam. 2023. Product Question Answering in E-Commerce: A Survey. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11951–11964, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Product Question Answering in E-Commerce: A Survey (Deng et al., ACL 2023)
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