Anand A. Rajasekar

Praveen Tangarajan, Anand A. Rajasekar, Manish Rathi et al.

E-commerce product pages contain a mix of structured specifications, unstructured reviews, and contextual elements like personalized offers or regional variants. Although informative, this volume can lead to cognitive overload, making it difficult for users to quickly and accurately find the information they need. Existing Product Question Answering (PQA) systems often fail to utilize rich user context and diverse product information effectively. We propose a scalable, end-to-end framework for e-commerce PQA using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) that deeply integrates contextual understanding. Our system leverages conversational history, user profiles, and product attributes to deliver relevant and personalized answers. It adeptly handles objective, subjective, and multi-intent queries across heterogeneous sources, while also identifying information gaps in the catalog to support ongoing content improvement. We also introduce novel metrics to measure the framework's performance which are broadly applicable for RAG system evaluations.

Anand A. Rajasekar, Nikesh Garera

Automatic question answering is an important yet challenging task in E-commerce given the millions of questions posted by users about the product that they are interested in purchasing. Hence, there is a great demand for automatic answer generation systems that provide quick responses using related information about the product. There are three sources of knowledge available for answering a user posted query, they are reviews, duplicate or similar questions, and specifications. Effectively utilizing these information sources will greatly aid us in answering complex questions. However, there are two main challenges present in exploiting these sources: (i) The presence of irrelevant information and (ii) the presence of ambiguity of sentiment present in reviews and similar questions. Through this work we propose a novel pipeline (MSQAP) that utilizes the rich information present in the aforementioned sources by separately performing relevancy and ambiguity prediction before generating a response. Experimental results show that our relevancy prediction model (BERT-QA) outperforms all other variants and has an improvement of 12.36% in F1 score compared to the BERT-base baseline. Our generation model (T5-QA) outperforms the baselines in all content preservation metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE and has an average improvement of 35.02% in ROUGE and 198.75% in BLEU compared to the highest performing baseline (HSSC-q). Human evaluation of our pipeline shows us that our method has an overall improvement in accuracy of 30.7% over the generation model (T5-QA), resulting in our full pipeline-based approach (MSQAP) providing more accurate answers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the e-commerce domain that automatically generates natural language answers combining the information present in diverse sources such as specifications, similar questions, and reviews data.