Generate-then-Retrieve: Intent-Aware FAQ Retrieval in Product Search

Zhiyu Chen, Jason Choi, Besnik Fetahu, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi


Abstract
Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) retrieval aims at retrieving question-answer pairs for a given a user query. Integrating FAQ retrieval with product search can not only empower users to make more informed purchase decisions, but also enhance user retention through efficient post-purchase support. Providing FAQ content without disrupting user’s shopping experience poses challenges on deciding when and how to show FAQ results. Our proposed intent-aware FAQ retrieval consists of (1) an intent classifier that predicts whether the query is looking for an FAQ; (2) a reformulation model that rewrites query into a natural question. Offline evaluation demonstrates that our approach improves 12% in Hit@1 on retrieving ground-truth FAQs, while reducing latency by 95% compared to baseline systems. These improvements are further validated by real user feedback, where more than 99% of users consider FAQs displayed on top of product search results is helpful. Overall, our findings show promising directions for integrating FAQ retrieval into product search at scale.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-industry.73
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Sunayana Sitaram, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Jason D Williams
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
763–771
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.73
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-industry.73
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiyu Chen, Jason Choi, Besnik Fetahu, Oleg Rokhlenko, and Shervin Malmasi. 2023. Generate-then-Retrieve: Intent-Aware FAQ Retrieval in Product Search. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 763–771, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generate-then-Retrieve: Intent-Aware FAQ Retrieval in Product Search (Chen et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.73.pdf