In e-commerce portals, generating answers for product-related questions has become a crucial task. In this paper, we focus on the task of product-aware answer generation, which learns to generate an accurate and complete answer from large-scale unlabeled e-commerce reviews and product attributes. However, safe answer problems pose significant challenges to text generation tasks, and e-commerce question-answering task is no exception. To generate more meaningful answers, in this paper, we propose a novel generative neural model, called the Meaningful Product Answer Generator (MPAG), which alleviates the safe answer problem by taking product reviews, product attributes, and a prototype answer into consideration. Product reviews and product attributes are used to provide meaningful content, while the prototype answer can yield a more diverse answer pattern. To this end, we propose a novel answer generator with a review reasoning module and a prototype answer reader. Our key idea is to obtain the correct question-aware information from a large scale collection of reviews and learn how to write a coherent and meaningful answer from an existing prototype answer. To be more specific, we propose a read-and-write memory consisting of selective writing units to conduct reasoning among these reviews. We then employ a prototype reader consisting of comprehensive matching to extract the answer skeleton from the prototype answer. Finally, we propose an answer editor to generate the final answer by taking the question and the above parts as input. Conducted on a real-world dataset collected from an e-commerce platform, extensive experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations. Human evaluation also demonstrates that our model can consistently generate specific and proper answers.
In e-commerce portals, generating answers for product-related questions has become a crucial task. In this paper, we propose the task of product-aware answer generation, which tends to generate an accurate and complete answer from large-scale unlabeled e-commerce reviews and product attributes. Unlike existing question-answering problems, answer generation in e-commerce confronts three main challenges: (1) Reviews are informal and noisy; (2) joint modeling of reviews and key-value product attributes is challenging; (3) traditional methods easily generate meaningless answers. To tackle above ch…
With the rise of knowledge graph (KG), question answering over knowledge base (KBQA) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Despite much research has been conducted on this topic, it is still challenging to apply KBQA technology in industry because business knowledge and real-world questions can be rather complicated. In this paper, we present AliMe-KBQA, a bold attempt to apply KBQA in the E-commerce customer service field. To handle real knowledge and questions, we extend the classic "subject-predicate-object (SPO)" structure with property hierarchy, key-value structure and comp…
Product-related question answering (QA) is an important but challenging task in E-Commerce. It leads to a great demand on automatic review-driven QA, which aims at providing instant responses towards user-posted questions based on diverse product reviews. Nevertheless, the rich information about personal opinions in product reviews, which is essential to answer those product-specific questions, is underutilized in current generation-based review-driven QA studies. There are two main challenges when exploiting the opinion information from the reviews to facilitate the opinion-aware answer gener…
In this paper, we study transfer learning for the PI and NLI problems, aiming to propose a general framework, which can effectively and efficiently adapt the shared knowledge learned from a resource-rich source domain to a resource- poor target domain. Specifically, since most existing transfer learning methods only focus on learning a shared feature space across domains while ignoring the relationship between the source and target domains, we propose to simultaneously learn shared representations and domain relationships in a unified framework. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and effecti…
We present AliMe Assist, an intelligent assistant designed for creating an innovative online shopping experience in E-commerce. Based on question answering (QA), AliMe Assist offers assistance service, customer service, and chatting service. It is able to take voice and text input, incorporate context to QA, and support multi-round interaction. Currently, it serves millions of customer questions per day and is able to address 85% of them. In this paper, we demonstrate the system, present the underlying techniques, and share our experience in dealing with real-world QA in the E-commerce field.
Pre-sales customer service is of importance to E-commerce platforms as it contributes to optimizing customers' buying process. To better serve users, we propose AliMe KG, a domain knowledge graph in E-commerce that captures user problems, points of interests (POI), item information and relations thereof. It helps to understand user needs, answer pre-sales questions and generate explanation texts. We applied AliMe KG to several online business scenarios such as shopping guide, question answering over properties and recommendation reason generation, and gained positive results. In the paper, we …
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing e…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Recently, Product Question Answering (PQA) on E-Commerce platforms has attracted increasing attention as it can act as an intelligent online shopping assistant and improve the customer shopping experience. Its key function, automatic answer generation for product-related questions, has been studied by aiming to generate content-preserving while question-related answers. However, an important characteristic of PQA, i.e., personalization, is neglected by existing methods. It is insufficient to provide the same "completely summarized" answer to all customers, since many customers are more willing…
School of Information, University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学信息学院）
Question Answering for complex questions is often modeled as a graph construction or traversal task, where a solver must build or traverse a graph of facts that answer and explain a given question. This "multi-hop" inference has been shown to be extremely challenging, with few models able to aggregate more than two facts before being overwhelmed by "semantic drift", or the tendency for long chains of facts to quickly drift off topic. This is a major barrier to current inference models, as even elementary science questions require an average of 4 to 6 facts to answer and explain. In this work w…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；NEC Laboratories America, Inc.（NEC美国实验室公司）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved great success in a broad range of natural language processing tasks. However, BERT cannot well support E-commerce related tasks due to the lack of two levels of domain knowledge, i.e., phrase-level and product-level. On one hand, many E-commerce tasks require an accurate understanding of domain phrases, whereas such fine-grained phrase-level knowledge is not explicitly modeled by BERT's training objective. On the other hand, product-level knowledge like product associations can enhance the language modeling of E-commerce, but they are not …
University of Science and Technique of China（中国科学技术大学）
The study of question answering has received increasing attention in recent years. This work focuses on providing an answer that compatible with both user intent and conditioning information corresponding to the question, such as delivery status and stock information in e-commerce. However, these conditions may be wrong or incomplete in real-world applications. Although existing question answering systems have considered the external information, such as categorical attributes and triples in knowledge base, they all assume that the external information is correct and complete. To alleviate the…
Tel-Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Large pre-trained language models (LMs) have been shown to perform surprisingly well when fine-tuned on tasks that require commonsense and world knowledge. However, in end-to-end architectures, it is difficult to explain what is the knowledge in the LM that allows it to make a correct prediction. In this work, we propose a model for multi-choice question answering, where a LM-based generator generates a textual hypothesis that is later used by a classifier to answer the question. The hypothesis provides a window into the information used by the fine-tuned LM that can be inspected by humans. A …
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）
Popular e-commerce websites such as Amazon offer community question answering systems for users to pose product related questions and experienced customers may provide answers voluntarily. In this paper, we show that the large volume of existing community question answering data can be beneficial when building a system for answering questions related to product facts and specifications. Our experimental results demonstrate that the performance of a model for answering questions related to products listed in the Home Depot website can be improved by a large margin via a simple transfer learning…
Can Large Language Models Identify Meaningful Touchpoints in Conversion Attribution?
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学智能科学与技术学院）；Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba（阿里巴巴淘宝天猫集团）
In spoken conversational question answering (SCQA), the answer to the corresponding question is generated by retrieving and then analyzing a fixed spoken document, including multi-part conversations. Most SCQA systems have considered only retrieving information from ordered utterances. However, the sequential order of dialogue is important to build a robust spoken conversational question answering system, and the changes of utterances order may severely result in low-quality and incoherent corpora. To this end, we introduce a self-supervised learning approach, including incoherence discriminat…
Price Per Unit (PPU) is an essential information for consumers shopping on e-commerce websites when comparing products. Finding total quantity in a product is required for computing PPU, which is not always provided by the sellers. To predict total quantity, all relevant quantities given in a product attributes such as title, description and image need to be inferred correctly. We formulate this problem as a question-answering (QA) task rather than named entity recognition (NER) task for fact extraction. In our QA approach, we first predict the unit of measure (UoM) type (e.g., volume, weight …
RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
Promptly and accurately answering questions on products is important for e-commerce applications. Manually answering product questions (e.g. on community question answering platforms) results in slow response and does not scale. Recent studies show that product reviews are a good source for real-time, automatic product question answering (PQA). In the literature, PQA is formulated as a retrieval problem with the goal to search for the most relevant reviews to answer a given product question. In this paper, we focus on the issue of answerability and answer reliability for PQA using reviews. Our…
Machine comprehension question answering, which finds an answer to the question given a passage, involves high-level reasoning processes of understanding and tracking the relevant contents across various semantic units such as words, phrases, and sentences in a document. This paper proposes the novel question-aware sentence gating networks that directly incorporate the sentence-level information into word-level encoding processes. To this end, our model first learns question-aware sentence representations and then dynamically combines them with word-level representations, resulting in semantic…
Product-specific community question answering platforms can greatly help address the concerns of potential customers. However, the user-provided answers on such platforms often vary a lot in their qualities. Helpfulness votes from the community can indicate the overall quality of the answer, but they are often missing. Accurately predicting the helpfulness of an answer to a given question and thus identifying helpful answers is becoming a demanding need. Since the helpfulness of an answer depends on multiple perspectives instead of only topical relevance investigated in typical QA tasks, commo…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京智源人工智能研究院）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Community Question Answering (CQA) is a well-defined task that can be used in many scenarios, such as E-Commerce and online user community for special interests. In these communities, users can post articles, give comment, raise a question and answer it. These data form the heterogeneous information sources where each information source have their own special structure and context (comments attached to an article or related question with answers). Most of the CQA methods only incorporate articles or Wikipedia to extract knowledge and answer the user's question. However, various types of inform…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
The task of long-form question answering (LFQA) involves retrieving documents relevant to a given question and using them to generate a paragraph-length answer. While many models have recently been proposed for LFQA, we show in this paper that the task formulation raises fundamental challenges regarding evaluation and dataset creation that currently preclude meaningful modeling progress. To demonstrate these challenges, we first design a new system that relies on sparse attention and contrastive retriever learning to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ELI5 LFQA dataset. While our syst…
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；UMass Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
We present QuAC, a dataset for Question Answering in Context that contains 14K information-seeking QA dialogs (100K questions in total). The dialogs involve two crowd workers: (1) a student who poses a sequence of freeform questions to learn as much as possible about a hidden Wikipedia text, and (2) a teacher who answers the questions by providing short excerpts from the text. QuAC introduces challenges not found in existing machine comprehension datasets: its questions are often more open-ended, unanswerable, or only meaningful within the dialog context, as we show in a detailed qualitative e…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Amazon（亚马逊）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
We address jointly two important tasks for Question Answering in community forums: given a new question, (i) find related existing questions, and (ii) find relevant answers to this new question. We further use an auxiliary task to complement the previous two, i.e., (iii) find good answers with respect to the thread question in a question-comment thread. We use deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn meaningful task-specific embeddings, which we then incorporate into a conditional random field (CRF) model for the multitask setting, performing joint learning over a complex graph structure. While DN…
SPARQL Generation: an analysis on fine-tuning OpenLLaMA for Question Answering over a Life Science Knowledge Graph
Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Switzerland（生态与进化系，洛桑大学，瑞士）；SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland（瑞士生物信息学研究所，洛桑，瑞士）
College of Information and Computer Sciences（信息与计算机科学学院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Given questions regarding some prototypical situation such as Name something that people usually do before they leave the house for work? a human can easily answer them via acquired experiences. There can be multiple right answers for such questions, with some more common for a situation than others. This paper introduces a new question answering dataset for training and evaluating common sense reasoning capabilities of artificial intelligence systems in such prototypical situations. The training set is gathered from an existing set of questions played in a long-running international game show…
Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Neural network models recently proposed for question answering (QA) primarily focus on capturing the passage-question relation. However, they have minimal capability to link relevant facts distributed across multiple sentences which is crucial in achieving deeper understanding, such as performing multi-sentence reasoning, co-reference resolution, etc. They also do not explicitly focus on the question and answer type which often plays a critical role in QA. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end question-focused multi-factor attention network for answer extraction. Multi-factor attentive …
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究所）；Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院）
Extracting semantic information on measurements and counts is an important topic in terms of analyzing scientific discourses. The 8th task of SemEval-2021: Counts and Measurements (MeasEval) aimed to boost research in this direction by providing a new dataset on which participants train their models to extract meaningful information on measurements from scientific texts. The competition is composed of five subtasks that build on top of each other: (1) quantity span identification, (2) unit extraction from the identified quantities and their value modifier classification, (3) span identificatio…
Accurate and efficient product classification is significant for E-commerce applications, as it enables various downstream tasks such as recommendation, retrieval, and pricing. Items often contain textual and visual information, and utilizing both modalities usually outperforms classification utilizing either mode alone. In this paper we describe our methodology and results for the SIGIR eCom Rakuten Data Challenge. We employ a dual attention technique to model image-text relationships using pretrained language and image embeddings. While dual attention has been widely used for Visual Question…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
This paper investigates a new task named Conversational Question Generation (CQG) which is to generate a question based on a passage and a conversation history (i.e., previous turns of question-answer pairs). CQG is a crucial task for developing intelligent agents that can drive question-answering style conversations or test user understanding of a given passage. Towards that end, we propose a new approach named Reinforced Dynamic Reasoning (ReDR) network, which is based on the general encoder-decoder framework but incorporates a reasoning procedure in a dynamic manner to better understand wha…
MedHopQA: A Disease-Centered Multi-Hop Reasoning Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for LLM-Based Biomedical Question Answering
National Library of Medicine, Division of Intramural Research（国家医学图书馆，院内研究部）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Computer Science（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校计算机科学系）；University of Michigan Medical School（密歇根大学医学院）
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；Flipkart（Flipkart公司）
While buying a product from the e-commerce websites, customers generally have a plethora of questions. From the perspective of both the e-commerce service provider as well as the customers, there must be an effective question answering system to provide immediate answers to the user queries. While certain questions can only be answered after using the product, there are many questions which can be answered from the product specification itself. Our work takes a first step in this direction by finding out the relevant product specifications, that can help answering the user questions. We propos…
Location-Aware Pretraining for Medical Difference Visual Question Answering
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Kigali, Rwanda（电气与计算机工程系，卡内基梅隆大学，刚果（金）基利齐）；University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia（墨尔本大学，墨尔本，澳大利亚）
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Grammarly（Grammarly公司）；Meta AI
Community-based Question Answering (CQA), which allows users to acquire their desired information, has increasingly become an essential component of online services in various domains such as E-commerce, travel, and dining. However, an overwhelming number of CQA pairs makes it difficult for users without particular intent to find useful information spread over CQA pairs. To help users quickly digest the key information, we propose the novel CQA summarization task that aims to create a concise summary from CQA pairs. To this end, we first design a multi-stage data annotation process and create …
Heudiasyc UMR 7253（HEUDIASYC混合研究单位7253）；Université de Technologie de Compiègne（贡比涅技术大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Google（谷歌）
Building computers able to answer questions on any subject is a long standing goal of artificial intelligence. Promising progress has recently been achieved by methods that learn to map questions to logical forms or database queries. Such approaches can be effective but at the cost of either large amounts of human-labeled data or by defining lexicons and grammars tailored by practitioners. In this paper, we instead take the radical approach of learning to map questions to vectorial feature representations. By mapping answers into the same space one can query any knowledge base independent of i…
DermaBench: A Clinician-Annotated Benchmark Dataset for Dermatology Visual Question Answering and Reasoning
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院伦敦分校）；Istanbul Medeniyet University（伊斯坦布尔医学大学）；Usak Research and Training Hospital（Usak研究与培训医院）；Istanbul Research and Training Hospital（伊斯坦布尔研究与培训医院）；Ipswich Hospital（伊普斯韦奇医院）；Medicana Atakoy Hospital（Medicana阿塔基医院）
Although pre-trained contextualized language models such as BERT achieve significant performance on various downstream tasks, current language representation still only focuses on linguistic objective at a specific granularity, which may not applicable when multiple levels of linguistic units are involved at the same time. Thus this work introduces and explores the universal representation learning, i.e., embeddings of different levels of linguistic unit in a uniform vector space. We present a universal representation model, BURT (BERT-inspired Universal Representation from learning meaningful…
Video question answering requires the models to understand and reason about both the complex video and language data to correctly derive the answers. Existing efforts have been focused on designing sophisticated cross-modal interactions to fuse the information from two modalities, while encoding the video and question holistically as frame and word sequences. Despite their success, these methods are essentially revolving around the sequential nature of video- and question-contents, providing little insight to the problem of question-answering and lacking interpretability as well. In this work,…
AmharicStoryQA: A Multicultural Story Question Answering Benchmark in Amharic
Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；AIMS AMMI；Resonance AI4D Lab（Resonance AI4D实验室）；Addis Ababa University（亚的斯亚贝巴大学）；HILCOE School of Computer Science and Technology（HILCOE计算机科学与技术学院）；University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）
