Shareable Representations for Search Query Understanding
This work addresses the challenge of efficiently handling billions of unique queries in shopping search engines, though it is incremental as it builds on existing transformer methods.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding diverse user intents in shopping search queries, such as price or brand preferences, by adapting a BERT-like transformer encoder architecture with domain-specific training to learn shareable representations, resulting in a model that reduces the number of large models needed for inference and enables rapid deployment of new classifiers.
Understanding search queries is critical for shopping search engines to deliver a satisfying customer experience. Popular shopping search engines receive billions of unique queries yearly, each of which can depict any of hundreds of user preferences or intents. In order to get the right results to customers it must be known queries like "inexpensive prom dresses" are intended to not only surface results of a certain product type but also products with a low price. Referred to as query intents, examples also include preferences for author, brand, age group, or simply a need for customer service. Recent works such as BERT have demonstrated the success of a large transformer encoder architecture with language model pre-training on a variety of NLP tasks. We adapt such an architecture to learn intents for search queries and describe methods to account for the noisiness and sparseness of search query data. We also describe cost effective ways of hosting transformer encoder models in context with low latency requirements. With the right domain-specific training we can build a shareable deep learning model whose internal representation can be reused for a variety of query understanding tasks including query intent identification. Model sharing allows for fewer large models needed to be served at inference time and provides a platform to quickly build and roll out new search query classifiers.