Learning to Rewrite Negation Queries in Product Search

Mengtian Guo, Mutasem Al-Darabsah, Choon Hui Teo, Jonathan May, Tarun Agarwal, Rahul Bhagat


Abstract
In product search, negation is frequently used to articulate unwanted product features or components. Modern search engines often struggle to comprehend negations, resulting in suboptimal user experiences. While various methods have been proposed to tackle negations in search, none of them took the vocabulary gap between query keywords and product text into consideration. In this work, we introduced a query rewriting approach to enhance the performance of product search engines when dealing with queries with negations. First, we introduced a data generation workflow that leverages large language models (LLMs) to extract query rewrites from product text. Subsequently, we trained a Seq2Seq model to generate query rewrite for unseen queries. Our experiments demonstrated that query rewriting yields a 3.17% precision@30 improvement for queries with negations. The promising results pave the way for further research on enhancing the search performance of queries with negations.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-industry.49
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert, Kareem Darwish, Apoorv Agarwal
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
575–582
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.49/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mengtian Guo, Mutasem Al-Darabsah, Choon Hui Teo, Jonathan May, Tarun Agarwal, and Rahul Bhagat. 2025. Learning to Rewrite Negation Queries in Product Search. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track, pages 575–582, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Rewrite Negation Queries in Product Search (Guo et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.49.pdf