Product Question Answering in E-Commerce: A Survey
It addresses the need for a comprehensive review of PQA for researchers and practitioners in e-commerce, but it is incremental as it summarizes existing work without new results.
This paper surveys product question answering (PQA) in e-commerce, reviewing problem settings, methods, datasets, and challenges to provide a systematic overview of the field.
Product question answering (PQA), aiming to automatically provide instant responses to customer's questions in E-Commerce platforms, has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Compared with typical QA problems, PQA exhibits unique challenges such as the subjectivity and reliability of user-generated contents in E-commerce platforms. Therefore, various problem settings and novel methods have been proposed to capture these special characteristics. In this paper, we aim to systematically review existing research efforts on PQA. Specifically, we categorize PQA studies into four problem settings in terms of the form of provided answers. We analyze the pros and cons, as well as present existing datasets and evaluation protocols for each setting. We further summarize the most significant challenges that characterize PQA from general QA applications and discuss their corresponding solutions. Finally, we conclude this paper by providing the prospect on several future directions.