A Usage-centric Take on Intent Understanding in E-Commerce

Wendi Zhou, Tianyi Li, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Mark Steedman, Jeff Pan


Abstract
Identifying and understanding user intents is a pivotal task for E-Commerce. Despite its essential role in product recommendation and business user profiling analysis, intent understanding has not been consistently defined or accurately benchmarked. In this paper, we focus on predicative user intents as “how a customer uses a product”, and pose intent understanding as a natural language reasoning task, independent of product ontologies. We identify two weaknesses of FolkScope, the SOTA E-Commerce Intent Knowledge Graph: category-rigidity and property-ambiguity. They limit its ability to strongly align user intents with products having the most desirable property, and to recommend useful products across diverse categories. Following these observations, we introduce a Product Recovery Benchmark featuring a novel evaluation framework and an example dataset. We further validate the above FolkScope weaknesses on this benchmark. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/stayones/Usgae-Centric-Intent-Understanding.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
228–236
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wendi Zhou, Tianyi Li, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Mark Steedman, and Jeff Pan. 2024. A Usage-centric Take on Intent Understanding in E-Commerce. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 228–236, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Usage-centric Take on Intent Understanding in E-Commerce (Zhou et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.14.pdf