Omkar Gurjar

Omkar Gurjar, Kin Sum Liu, Praveen Kolli et al.

Despite the success of vision-language models in various generative tasks, obtaining high-quality semantic representations for products and user intents is still challenging due to the inability of off-the-shelf models to capture nuanced relationships between the entities. In this paper, we introduce a joint training framework for product and user queries by aligning uni-modal and multi-modal encoders through contrastive learning on image-text data. Our novel approach trains a query encoder with an LLM-curated relevance dataset, eliminating the reliance on engagement history. These embeddings demonstrate strong generalization capabilities and improve performance across applications, including product categorization and relevance prediction. For personalized ads recommendation, a significant uplift in the click-through rate and conversion rate after the deployment further confirms the impact on key business metrics. We believe that the flexibility of our framework makes it a promising solution toward enriching the user experience across the e-commerce landscape.

Omkar Gurjar, Manish Gupta

Although several automatic itinerary generation services have made travel planning easy, often times travellers find themselves in unique situations where they cannot make the best out of their trip. Visitors differ in terms of many factors such as suffering from a disability, being of a particular dietary preference, travelling with a toddler, etc. While most tourist spots are universal, others may not be inclusive for all. In this paper, we focus on the problem of mining inclusion and exclusion phrases associated with 11 such factors, from reviews related to a tourist spot. While existing work on tourism data mining mainly focuses on structured extraction of trip related information, personalized sentiment analysis, and automatic itinerary generation, to the best of our knowledge this is the first work on inclusion/exclusion phrase mining from tourism reviews. Using a dataset of 2000 reviews related to 1000 tourist spots, our broad level classifier provides a binary overlap F1 of $\sim$80 and $\sim$82 to classify a phrase as inclusion or exclusion respectively. Further, our inclusion/exclusion classifier provides an F1 of $\sim$98 and $\sim$97 for 11-class inclusion and exclusion classification respectively. We believe that our work can significantly improve the quality of an automatic itinerary generation service.