Quality product descriptions are critical for providing competitive customer
experience in an e-commerce platform. An accurate and attractive description
not only helps customers make an informed decision but also improves the
likelihood of purchase. However, crafting a successful product description is
tedious and highly time-consuming. Due to its importance, automating the
product description generation has attracted considerable interests from both
research and industrial communities. Existing methods mainly use templates or
statistical methods, and their performance could be rather limited. In this
paper, we explore a new way to generate the personalized product description by
combining the power of neural networks and knowledge base. Specifically, we
propose a KnOwledge Based pErsonalized (or KOBE) product description generation
model in the context of e-commerce. In KOBE, we extend the encoder-decoder
framework, the Transformer, to a sequence modeling formulation using
self-attention. In order to make the description both informative and
personalized, KOBE considers a variety of important factors during text
generation, including product aspects, user categories, and knowledge base,
etc. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method
out-performs the baseline on various metrics. KOBE can achieve an improvement
of 9.7% over state-of-the-arts in terms of BLEU. We also present several case
studies as the anecdotal evidence to further prove the effectiveness of the
proposed approach. The framework has been deployed in Taobao, the largest
online e-commerce platform in China.Comment: KDD 2019 Camera-ready. Website:
https://sites.google.com/view/kobe201