Expedia, AI Singapore join forces on AI to improve online searches for Asian travellers TTG Asia

Expedia Group has announced a collaboration with AI Singapore (AISG) – an inter-agency unit tasked to catalyse and grow the country's artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities – under its flagship 100 Experiments (100E) programme to develop an AI solution to transform the online search experience for Asian travellers. The first online travel platform to collaborate with AISG for 100E, Expedia Group will provide a team of experienced engineers, data scientists and marketers to work with the AISG's project lead, project managers and AI apprentices to enhance travel search query understanding and improve the accuracy of search query resolution in Asian languages. Today's search engines are efficient in understanding travel search queries and providing query resolutions in English, as English is the dominant language used online by 25 per cent of all Internet users. However, when dealing with travel search queries conducted in Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese, the performance of the search engines declines significantly and the accuracy of query resolution dips. For a start, the Expedia Group and AI Singapore project team will leverage natural language processing and machine learning to develop an AI-based model to enhance search query understanding and resolution in the Japanese language, before extending the model to other Asian languages to enhance online search efficiency.