A Multi-task Learning Approach for Improving Product Title Compression with User Search Log Data

It is a challenging and practical research problem to obtain effective compression of lengthy product titles for E-commerce. This is particularly important as more and more users browse mobile E-commerce apps and more merchants make the original product titles redundant and lengthy for Search Engine Optimization. Traditional text summarization approaches often require a large amount of preprocessing costs and do not capture the important issue of conversion rate in E-commerce. This paper proposes a novel multi-task learning approach for improving product title compression with user search log data. In particular, a pointer network-based sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized for title compression with an attentive mechanism as an extractive method and an attentive encoder-decoder approach is utilized for generating user search queries. The encoding parameters (i.e., semantic embedding of original titles) are shared among the two tasks and the attention distributions are jointly optimized. An extensive set of experiments with both human annotated data and online deployment demonstrate the advantage of the proposed research for both compression qualities and online business values.Comment: 8 Pages, accepted at AAAI 201

Probing Product Description Generation via Posterior Distillation

In product description generation (PDG), the user-cared aspect is critical for the recommendation system, which can not only improve user's experiences but also obtain more clicks. High-quality customer reviews can be considered as an ideal source to mine user-cared aspects. However, in reality, a large number of new products (known as long-tailed commodities) cannot gather sufficient amount of customer reviews, which brings a big challenge in the product description generation task. Existing works tend to generate the product description solely based on item information, i.e., product attributes or title words, which leads to tedious contents and cannot attract customers effectively. To tackle this problem, we propose an adaptive posterior network based on Transformer architecture that can utilize user-cared information from customer reviews. Specifically, we first extend the self-attentive Transformer encoder to encode product titles and attributes. Then, we apply an adaptive posterior distillation module to utilize useful review information, which integrates user-cared aspects to the generation process. Finally, we apply a Transformer-based decoding phase with copy mechanism to automatically generate the product description. Besides, we also collect a large-scare Chinese product description dataset to support our work and further research in this field. Experimental results show that our model is superior to traditional generative models in both automatic indicators and human evaluation

Ask the GRU: Multi-Task Learning for Deep Text Recommendations

In a variety of application domains the content to be recommended to users is associated with text. This includes research papers, movies with associated plot summaries, news articles, blog posts, etc. Recommendation approaches based on latent factor models can be extended naturally to leverage text by employing an explicit mapping from text to factors. This enables recommendations for new, unseen content, and may generalize better, since the factors for all items are produced by a compactly-parametrized model. Previous work has used topic models or averages of word embeddings for this mapping. In this paper we present a method leveraging deep recurrent neural networks to encode the text sequence into a latent vector, specifically gated recurrent units (GRUs) trained end-to-end on the collaborative filtering task. For the task of scientific paper recommendation, this yields models with significantly higher accuracy. In cold-start scenarios, we beat the previous state-of-the-art, all of which ignore word order. Performance is further improved by multi-task learning, where the text encoder network is trained for a combination of content recommendation and item metadata prediction. This regularizes the collaborative filtering model, ameliorating the problem of sparsity of the observed rating matrix.Comment: 8 page