Personalizing user experience with high-quality recommendations based on user activity is vital for e-commerce platforms. This is particularly important in scenarios where the user's intent is not explicit, such as on the homepage. Recently, personalized embedding-based systems have significantly improved the quality of recommendations and search in the e-commerce domain. However, most of these works focus on enhancing the retrieval stage. In this paper, we demonstrate that features produced by retrieval-focused deep learning models are sub-optimal for ranking stage in e-commerce recommendations. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage training process that fine-tunes two-tower models to achieve optimal ranking performance. We provide a detailed description of our transformer-based two-tower model architecture, which is specifically designed for personalization in e-commerce. Additionally, we introduce a novel technique for debiasing context in offline models and report significant improvements in ranking performance when using web-search queries for e-commerce recommendations. Our model has been successfully deployed at Yandex, serves millions of users daily, and has delivered strong performance in online A/B testing.
Personalized search has been a hot research topic for many years and has been widely used in e-commerce. This paper describes our solution to tackle the challenge of personalized e-commerce search at CIKM Cup 2016. The goal of this competition is to predict search relevance and re-rank the result items in SERP according to the personalized search, browsing and purchasing preferences. Based on a detailed analysis of the provided data, we extract three different types of features, i.e., statistic features, query-item features and session features. Different models are used on these features, inc…
Nowadays e-commerce search has become an integral part of many people's shopping routines. Two critical challenges stay in today's e-commerce search: how to retrieve items that are semantically relevant but not exact matching to query terms, and how to retrieve items that are more personalized to different users for the same search query. In this paper, we present a novel approach called DPSR, which stands for Deep Personalized and Semantic Retrieval, to tackle this problem. Explicitly, we share our design decisions on how to architect a retrieval system so as to serve industry-scale traffic e…
In fashion e-commerce platforms, product discovery is one of the key components of a good user experience. There are numerous ways using which people find the products they desire. Similar product recommendations is one of the popular modes using which users find products that resonate with their intent. Generally these recommendations are not personalized to a specific user. Traditionally, collaborative filtering based approaches have been popular in the literature for recommending non-personalized products given a query product. Also, there has been focus on personalizing the product listing…
Intelligent Classification and Personalized Recommendation of E-commerce Products Based on Machine Learning
Santa Clara University（圣克拉拉大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Colorado State University（科罗拉多州立大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
To identify the most appropriate recommendation model for an e-commerce business, a live evaluation should be performed on the shopping website to measure the influence of personalization in real-time. The aim of this paper is to introduce and justify two new metrics -- CTR NoRepeat and Click & Buy rate -- which stem from the standard metrics, Click-through(CTR) and Buy-through rate(BTR), respectively. The former variation tackles the issue of overestimation of clicks in the original CTR while the latter accounts for noting purchases of products that have been previously clicked, in order to v…
Recommender systems are an essential component of e-commerce marketplaces, helping consumers navigate massive amounts of inventory and find what they need or love. In this paper, we present an approach for generating personalized item recommendations in an e-commerce marketplace by learning to embed items and users in the same vector space. In order to alleviate the considerable cold-start problem present in large marketplaces, item and user embeddings are computed using content features and multi-modal onsite user activity respectively. Data ablation is incorporated into the offline model tra…
We present our solution to the Yandex Personalized Web Search Challenge. The aim of this challenge was to use the historical search logs to personalize top-N document rankings for a set of test users. We used over 100 features extracted from user- and query-depended contexts to train neural net and tree-based learning-to-rank and regression models. Our final submission, which was a blend of several different models, achieved an NDCG@10 of 0.80476 and placed 4'th amongst the 194 teams winning 3'rd prize.
iLambda；University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）；Kent State University（肯特州立大学）
Similar product recommendation is one of the most common scenes in e-commerce. Many recommendation algorithms such as item-to-item Collaborative Filtering are working on measuring item similarities. In this paper, we introduce our real-time personalized algorithm to model product similarity and real-time user interests. We also introduce several other baseline algorithms including an image-similarity-based method, item-to-item collaborative filtering, and item2vec, and compare them on our large-scale real-world e-commerce dataset. The algorithms which achieve good offline results are also test…
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…
Considering the level of competition prevailing in Business-to-Consumer (B2C) E-Commerce domain and the huge investments required to attract new customers, firms are now giving more focus to reduce their customer churn rate. Churn rate is the ratio of customers who part away with the firm in a specific time period. One of the best mechanism to retain current customers is to identify any potential churn and respond fast to prevent it. Detecting early signs of a potential churn, recognizing what the customer is looking for by the movement and automating personalized win back campaigns are essent…
On most sponsored search platforms, advertisers bid on some keywords for their advertisements (ads). Given a search request, ad retrieval module rewrites the query into bidding keywords, and uses these keywords as keys to select Top N ads through inverted indexes. In this way, an ad will not be retrieved even if queries are related when the advertiser does not bid on corresponding keywords. Moreover, most ad retrieval approaches regard rewriting and ad-selecting as two separated tasks, and focus on boosting relevance between search queries and ads. Recently, in e-commerce sponsored search more…
Searching for and making decisions about products is becoming increasingly easier in the e-commerce space, thanks to the evolution of recommender systems. Personalization and recommender systems have gone hand-in-hand to help customers fulfill their shopping needs and improve their experiences in the process. With the growing adoption of conversational platforms for shopping, it has become important to build personalized models at scale to handle the large influx of data and perform inference in real-time. In this work, we present an end-to-end machine learning system for personalized conversa…
HCMC University of Technology, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市国家大学胡志明市理工大学）；FAW Institute, Johannes Kepler University Linz（林茨约翰内斯·开普勒大学FAW研究所）
With the considerable development of customer-to-customer (C2C) e-commerce in the recent years, there is a big demand for an effective recommendation system that suggests suitable websites for users to sell their items with some specified needs. Nonetheless, e-commerce recommendation systems are mostly designed for business-to-customer (B2C) websites, where the systems offer the consumers the products that they might like to buy. Almost none of the related research works focus on choosing selling sites for target items. In this paper, we introduce an approach that recommends the selling websit…
Product search is one of the most popular methods for people to discover and purchase products on e-commerce websites. Because personal preferences often have an important influence on the purchase decision of each customer, it is intuitive that personalization should be beneficial for product search engines. While synthetic experiments from previous studies show that purchase histories are useful for identifying the individual intent of each product search session, the effect of personalization on product search in practice, however, remains mostly unknown. In this paper, we formulate the pro…
The rapid growth of e-commerce has made people accustomed to shopping online. Before making purchases on e-commerce websites, most consumers tend to rely on rating scores and review information to make purchase decisions. With this information, they can infer the quality of products to reduce the risk of purchase. Specifically, items with high rating scores and good reviews tend to be less risky, while items with low rating scores and bad reviews might be risky to purchase. On the other hand, the purchase behaviors will also be influenced by consumers' tolerance of risks, known as the risk att…
We study a novel problem of sponsored search (SS) for E-Commerce platforms: how we can attract query users to click product advertisements (ads) by presenting them features of products that attract them. This not only benefits merchants and the platform, but also improves user experience. The problem is challenging due to the following reasons: (1) We need to carefully manipulate the ad content without affecting user search experience. (2) It is difficult to obtain users' explicit feedback of their preference in product features. (3) Nowadays, a great portion of the search traffic in E-Commerc…
Traditional recommendation systems mainly focus on modeling user interests. However, the dynamics of recommended items caused by attribute modifications (e.g. changes in prices) are also of great importance in real systems, especially in the fast-growing e-commerce environment, which may cause the users' demands to emerge, shift and disappear. Recent studies that make efforts on dynamic item representations treat the item attributes as side information but ignore its temporal dependency, or model the item evolution with a sequence of related users but do not consider item attributes. In this p…
We introduce deep learning models to the two most important stages in product search at JD.com, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world. Specifically, we outline the design of a deep learning system that retrieves semantically relevant items to a query within milliseconds, and a pairwise deep re-ranking system, which learns subtle user preferences. Compared to traditional search systems, the proposed approaches are better at semantic retrieval and personalized ranking, achieving significant improvements.
Group buying, as an emerging form of purchase in social e-commerce websites, such as Pinduoduo, has recently achieved great success. In this new business model, users, initiator, can launch a group and share products to their social networks, and when there are enough friends, participants, join it, the deal is clinched. Group-buying recommendation for social e-commerce, which recommends an item list when users want to launch a group, plays an important role in the group success ratio and sales. However, designing a personalized recommendation model for group buying is an entirely new problem …
E-commerce users may expect different products even for the same query, due to their diverse personal preferences. It is well-known that there are two types of preferences: long-term ones and short-term ones. The former refers to user' inherent purchasing bias and evolves slowly. By contrast, the latter reflects users' purchasing inclination in a relatively short period. They both affect users' current purchasing intentions. However, few research efforts have been dedicated to jointly model them for the personalized product search. To this end, we propose a novel Attentive Long Short-Term Pref…
Many e-commerce websites use recommender systems or personalized rankers to personalize search results based on their previous interactions. However, a large fraction of users has no prior inter-actions, making it impossible to use collaborative filtering or rely on user history for personalization. Even the most active users mayvisit only a few times a year and may have volatile needs or different personas, making their personal history a sparse and noisy signal at best. This paper investigates how, when we cannot rely on the user history, the large scale availability of other user interactio…
Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) is a representative pairwise learning method for optimizing recommendation models. It is widely known that the performance of BPR depends largely on the quality of negative sampler. In this paper, we make two contributions with respect to BPR. First, we find that sampling negative items from the whole space is unnecessary and may even degrade the performance. Second, focusing on the purchase feedback of E-commerce, we propose an effective sampler for BPR by leveraging the additional view data. In our proposed sampler, users' viewed interactions are considere…
Product search is an important way for people to browse and purchase items on E-commerce platforms. While customers tend to make choices based on their personal tastes and preferences, analysis of commercial product search logs has shown that personalization does not always improve product search quality. Most existing product search techniques, however, conduct undifferentiated personalization across search sessions. They either use a fixed coefficient to control the influence of personalization or let personalization take effect all the time with an attention mechanism. The only notable exce…
A personalized conversational sales agent could have much commercial potential. E-commerce companies such as Amazon, eBay, JD, Alibaba etc. are piloting such kind of agents with their users. However, the research on this topic is very limited and existing solutions are either based on single round adhoc search engine or traditional multi round dialog system. They usually only utilize user inputs in the current session, ignoring users' long term preferences. On the other hand, it is well known that sales conversion rate can be greatly improved based on recommender systems, which learn user pref…
E-commerce platforms consistently aim to provide personalized recommendations to drive user engagement, enhance overall user experience, and improve business metrics. Most e-commerce platforms contain multiple carousels on their homepage, each attempting to capture different facets of the shopping experience. Given varied user preferences, optimizing the placement of these carousels is critical for improved user satisfaction. Furthermore, items within a carousel may change dynamically based on sequential user actions, thus necessitating online ranking of carousels. In this work, we present a s…
Modeling user's historical feedback is essential for Click-Through Rate Prediction in personalized search and recommendation. Existing methods usually only model users' positive feedback information such as click sequences which neglects the context information of the feedback. In this paper, we propose a new perspective for context-aware users' behavior modeling by including the whole page-wisely exposed products and the corresponding feedback as contextualized page-wise feedback sequence. The intra-page context information and inter-page interest evolution can be captured to learn more speci…
In most E-commerce platforms, whether the displayed items trigger the user's interest largely depends on their most eye-catching multimodal content. Consequently, increasing efforts focus on modeling multimodal user preference, and the pressing paradigm is to incorporate complete multimodal deep features of the items into the recommendation module. However, the existing studies ignore the mismatch problem between multimodal feature extraction (MFE) and user interest modeling (UIM). That is, MFE and UIM have different emphases. Specifically, MFE is migrated from and adapted to upstream tasks su…
Personalized recommendations are the backbone machine learning (ML) algorithm that powers several important application domains (e.g., ads, e-commerce, etc) serviced from cloud datacenters. Sparse embedding layers are a crucial building block in designing recommendations yet little attention has been paid in properly accelerating this important ML algorithm. This paper first provides a detailed workload characterization on personalized recommendations and identifies two significant performance limiters: memory-intensive embedding layers and compute-intensive multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layers…
The item details page (IDP) is a web page on an e-commerce website that provides information on a specific product or item listing. Just below the details of the item on this page, the buyer can usually find recommendations for other relevant items. These are typically in the form of a series of modules or carousels, with each module containing a set of recommended items. The selection and ordering of these item recommendation modules are intended to increase discover-ability of relevant items and encourage greater user engagement, while simultaneously showcasing diversity of inventory and sat…
