E-BERT: A Phrase and Product Knowledge Enhanced Language Model for E-commerce
This work addresses the need for better language models in e-commerce applications, but it is incremental as it builds on BERT with domain-specific enhancements.
The paper tackled the problem of BERT's lack of domain knowledge for e-commerce tasks by proposing E-BERT, a pre-training framework that incorporates phrase-level and product-level knowledge, achieving promising results in tasks like review-based question answering and aspect extraction.
Pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved great success in a broad range of natural language processing tasks. However, BERT cannot well support E-commerce related tasks due to the lack of two levels of domain knowledge, i.e., phrase-level and product-level. On one hand, many E-commerce tasks require an accurate understanding of domain phrases, whereas such fine-grained phrase-level knowledge is not explicitly modeled by BERT's training objective. On the other hand, product-level knowledge like product associations can enhance the language modeling of E-commerce, but they are not factual knowledge thus using them indiscriminately may introduce noise. To tackle the problem, we propose a unified pre-training framework, namely, E-BERT. Specifically, to preserve phrase-level knowledge, we introduce Adaptive Hybrid Masking, which allows the model to adaptively switch from learning preliminary word knowledge to learning complex phrases, based on the fitting progress of two modes. To utilize product-level knowledge, we introduce Neighbor Product Reconstruction, which trains E-BERT to predict a product's associated neighbors with a denoising cross attention layer. Our investigation reveals promising results in four downstream tasks, i.e., review-based question answering, aspect extraction, aspect sentiment classification, and product classification.