Consumers on a shopping mission often leverage both product search and information seeking systems, such as web search engines and Question Answering (QA) systems, in an iterative process to improve their understanding of available products and reach a purchase decision. While product search is useful for shoppers to find the actual products meeting their requirements in the catalog, information seeking systems can be utilized to answer any questions they may have to refine those requirements. The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened up an opportunity to bridge the gap between the two tasks to help customers achieve their goals quickly and effectively by integrating conversational QA within product search. In this paper, we propose to recommend users Question-Answer (Q&A) pairs that are relevant to their product search and can help them make a purchase decision. We discuss the different aspects of the problem including the requirements and characteristics of the Q&A pairs, their generation, and the optimization of the Q&A recommendation task. We highlight the challenges, open problems, and suggested solutions to encourage future research in this emerging area.

Identifying and understanding user intents is a pivotal task for E-Commerce. Despite its popularity, intent understanding has not been consistently defined or accurately benchmarked. In this paper, we focus on predicative user intents as "how a customer uses a product", and pose intent understanding as a natural language reasoning task, independent of product ontologies. We identify two weaknesses of FolkScope, the SOTA E-Commerce Intent Knowledge Graph, that limit its capacity to reason about user intents and to recommend diverse useful products. Following these observations, we introduce a Product Recovery Benchmark including a novel evaluation framework and an example dataset. We further validate the above FolkScope weaknesses on this benchmark.

The goal of product mapping is to decide, whether two listings from two different e-shops describe the same products. Existing datasets of matching and non-matching pairs of products, however, often suffer from incomplete product information or contain only very distant non-matching products. Therefore, while predictive models trained on these datasets achieve good results on them, in practice, they are unusable as they cannot distinguish very similar but non-matching pairs of products. This paper introduces two new datasets for product mapping: ProMapCz consisting of 1,495 Czech product pairs and ProMapEn consisting of 1,555 English product pairs of matching and non-matching products manually scraped from two pairs of e-shops. The datasets contain both images and textual descriptions of the products, including their specifications, making them one of the most complete datasets for product mapping. Additionally, the non-matching products were selected in two phases, creating two types of non-matches -- close non-matches and medium non-matches. Even the medium non-matches are pairs of products that are much more similar than non-matches in other datasets -- for example, they still need to have the same brand and similar name and price. After simple data preprocessing, several machine learning algorithms were trained on these and two the other datasets to demonstrate the complexity and completeness of ProMap datasets. ProMap datasets are presented as a golden standard for further research of product mapping filling the gaps in existing ones.

Recently, instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) , represented by ChatGPT, have exhibited exceptional performance in general Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the unique characteristics of E-commerce data pose significant challenges to general LLMs. An LLM tailored specifically for E-commerce scenarios, possessing robust cross-dataset/task generalization capabilities, is a pressing necessity. To solve this issue, in this work, we proposed the first e-commerce instruction dataset EcomInstruct, with a total of 2.5 million instruction data. EcomInstruct scales up the data size and task diversity by constructing atomic tasks with E-commerce basic data types, such as product information, user reviews. Atomic tasks are defined as intermediate tasks implicitly involved in solving a final task, which we also call Chain-of-Task tasks. We developed EcomGPT with different parameter scales by training the backbone model BLOOMZ with the EcomInstruct. Benefiting from the fundamental semantic understanding capabilities acquired from the Chain-of-Task tasks, EcomGPT exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that EcomGPT outperforms ChatGPT in term of cross-dataset/task generalization on E-commerce tasks.

Technology has created an ocean of opportunities in the advertising and marketing world as every day, by every minute, there is a new idea, a new innovation happening. Be it the world of artificial intelligence, virtual reality or automation, every day there is something new to be worked with. These tools are even more integral for small-sized businesses and startups who can use them to get the recognition and reach the masses before their competition. But are they using it to their full capacity? We asked a few experts.

This work addresses an alternative approach for query expansion (QE) using a generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance the effectiveness of information search in e-commerce. We propose a modified QE conditional GAN (mQE-CGAN) framework, which resolves keywords by expanding the query with a synthetically generated query that proposes semantic information from text input. We train a sequence-to-sequence transformer model as the generator to produce keywords and use a recurrent neural network model as the discriminator to classify an adversarial output with the generator. With the modified CGAN framework, various forms of semantic insights gathered from the query document corpus are introduced to the generation process. We leverage these insights as conditions for the generator model and discuss their effectiveness for the query expansion task. Our experiments demonstrate that the utilization of condition structures within the mQE-CGAN framework can increase the semantic similarity between generated sequences and reference documents up to nearly 10% compared to baseline models

Recent advancements in dialogue response selection (DRS) are based on the \textit{task-adaptive pre-training (TAP)} approach, by first initializing their model with BERT~\cite{devlin-etal-2019-bert}, and adapt to dialogue data with dialogue-specific or fine-grained pre-training tasks. However, it is uncertain whether BERT is the best initialization choice, or whether the proposed dialogue-specific fine-grained learning tasks are actually better than MLM+NSP. This paper aims to verify assumptions made in previous works and understand the source of improvements for DRS. We show that initializing with RoBERTa achieve similar performance as BERT, and MLM+NSP can outperform all previously proposed TAP tasks, during which we also contribute a new state-of-the-art on the Ubuntu corpus. Additional analyses shows that the main source of improvements comes from the TAP step, and that the NSP task is crucial to DRS, different from common NLU tasks.

Product description generation is a challenging and under-explored task. Most such work takes a set of product attributes as inputs then generates a description from scratch in a single pass. However, this widespread paradigm might be limited when facing the dynamic wishes of users on constraining the description, such as deleting or adding the content of a user-specified attribute based on the previous version. To address this challenge, we explore a new draft-command-edit manner in description generation, leading to the proposed new task-controllable text editing in E-commerce. More specifically, we allow systems to receive a command (deleting or adding) from the user and then generate a description by flexibly modifying the content based on the previous version. It is easier and more practical to meet the new needs by modifying previous versions than generating from scratch. Furthermore, we design a data augmentation method to remedy the low resource challenge in this task, which contains a model-based and a rule-based strategy to imitate the edit by humans. To accompany this new task, we present a human-written draft-command-edit dataset called E-cEdits and a new metric "Attribute Edit". Our experimental results show that using the new data augmentation method outperforms baselines to a greater extent in both automatic and human evaluations.

Substitute (S): the item is somewhat relevant: it fails to fulfill some aspects of the query, but the item can be used as In the Amazon KDD Cup 2022, we aim to apply natural language a functional substitute; processing methods to improve the quality of search results that can Complement (C): the item does not fulfill the query but significantly enhance user experience and engagement with search could be used in combination with an exact item; engines for e-commerce. We discuss our practical solution for this Irrelevant (I): the item is irrelevant, or it fails to fulfill a competition, ranking 6th in task one, 2nd in task two, and 2nd in central aspect of the query.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), is a societal buzzword that now crosses every area of human experience. Whether it is our leisure activities, our medical interventions, our banking transactions or our shopping pursuits, AI is now pivotal to the way in which we conduct our personal lives. This phenomenon has not emerged haphazardly, but is a trajectory that has ensued from the benefits that business has enjoyed from its use, and one that now every area of commerce needs to employ, and maintain, in order to enjoy any success. According to IBM, 65 percent of all organisations will have accelerated the use of digital technologies by 2022 and more than 85 percent of advanced adopters are reducing operating costs. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay.