question intent
Generate-then-Retrieve: Intent-Aware FAQ Retrieval in Product Search
Chen, Zhiyu, Choi, Jason, Fetahu, Besnik, Rokhlenko, Oleg, Malmasi, Shervin
Customers interacting with product search engines are increasingly formulating information-seeking queries. Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) retrieval aims to retrieve common question-answer pairs for a user query with question intent. Integrating FAQ retrieval in product search can not only empower users to make more informed purchase decisions, but also enhance user retention through efficient post-purchase support. Determining when an FAQ entry can satisfy a user's information need within product search, without disrupting their shopping experience, represents an important challenge. We propose an intent-aware FAQ retrieval system consisting of (1) an intent classifier that predicts when a user's information need can be answered by an FAQ; (2) a reformulation model that rewrites a query into a natural question. Offline evaluation demonstrates that our approach improves Hit@1 by 13% on retrieving ground-truth FAQs, while reducing latency by 95% compared to baseline systems. These improvements are further validated by real user feedback, where 71% of displayed FAQs on top of product search results received explicit positive user feedback. Overall, our findings show promising directions for integrating FAQ retrieval into product search at scale.
Translating Web Search Queries into Natural Language Questions
Kumar, Adarsh, Dandapat, Sandipan, Chordia, Sushil
Users often query a search engine with a specific question in mind and often these queries are keywords or sub-sentential fragments. For example, if the users want to know the answer for "What's the capital of USA", they will most probably query "capital of USA" or "USA capital" or some keyword-based variation of this. For example, for the user entered query "capital of USA", the most probable question intent is "What's the capital of USA?". In this paper, we are proposing a method to generate well-formed natural language question from a given keyword-based query, which has the same question intent as the query. Conversion of keyword-based web query into a well-formed question has lots of applications, with some of them being in search engines, Community Question Answering (CQA) website and bots communication. We found a synergy between query-to-question problem with standard machine translation(MT) task. We have used both Statistical MT (SMT) and Neural MT (NMT) models to generate the questions from the query. We have observed that MT models perform well in terms of both automatic and human evaluation.