Towards a simplified ontology for better e-commerce search
This work targets e-commerce platforms to improve search accuracy, but it is incremental as it builds on existing query understanding methods.
The paper addresses the problem of suboptimal ontologies in e-commerce search by proposing a simplified ontology framework specifically designed for this domain, and presents three automated methods for extracting product classes, with performance comparisons provided.
Query Understanding is a semantic search method that can classify tokens in a customer's search query to entities such as Product, Brand, etc. This method can overcome the limitations of bag-of-words methods but requires an ontology. We show that current ontologies are not optimized for search and propose a simplified ontology framework designed specifically for e-commerce search and retrieval. We also present three methods for automatically extracting product classes for the proposed ontology and compare their performance relative to each other.