Kaggle's Mercari Price Suggestion Challenge: How I Used CNNs and Tensorflow and Lost a Silver Medal

In January 2018, I entered a Kaggle competition called the Mercari Price Suggestion. The competition lasted three months and ended a few weeks ago. The challenge was to build an algorithm that automatically suggests product prices to online sellers, based on free-text descriptions, product categories and a few other attributes. I joined the competition a month before it ended, eager to explore how to use Deep Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for this problem.Those four weeks competing were a sequence of curiosity, engagement, and excitement. I ended up with a single end-to-end Deep Learning model (no ensembles) implemented in Tensorflow, which landed me in the the 35th position (out of 2,384 teams) in the Private Leaderboard.