Supervised Transfer Learning for Product Information Question Answering
This work addresses the challenge of building effective product information Q&A systems for e-commerce platforms, though it is incremental as it applies a known transfer learning technique to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of improving product fact and specification question answering by leveraging existing community Q&A data, achieving a 10% accuracy increase in a data-limited setting through transfer learning from Amazon to Home Depot datasets.
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 technique from an existing large-scale Amazon community question answering dataset. Transfer learning can result in an increase of about 10% in accuracy in the experimental setting where we restrict the size of the data of the target task used for training. As an application of this work, we integrate the best performing model trained in this work into a mobile-based shopping assistant and show its usefulness.