AliCoCo: Alibaba E-commerce Cognitive Concept Net
This addresses the semantic gap in e-commerce for platforms like Alibaba, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ontology efforts.
The paper tackles the problem of poorly defined user needs in e-commerce by constructing AliCoCo, a large-scale cognitive concept net, which has been implemented on Alibaba's platform to enhance intelligent shopping experiences.
One of the ultimate goals of e-commerce platforms is to satisfy various shopping needs for their customers. Much efforts are devoted to creating taxonomies or ontologies in e-commerce towards this goal. However, user needs in e-commerce are still not well defined, and none of the existing ontologies has the enough depth and breadth for universal user needs understanding. The semantic gap in-between prevents shopping experience from being more intelligent. In this paper, we propose to construct a large-scale e-commerce cognitive concept net named "AliCoCo", which is practiced in Alibaba, the largest Chinese e-commerce platform in the world. We formally define user needs in e-commerce, then conceptualize them as nodes in the net. We present details on how AliCoCo is constructed semi-automatically and its successful, ongoing and potential applications in e-commerce.