Identifying granular and actionable topics from customer questions (CQ) posted on e-commerce websites helps surface the missing information expected by customers on the product detail page (DP), provide insights to brands and sellers on what critical product information that the customers are looking before making a purchase decision and helps enrich the catalog quality to improve the overall customer experience (CX). We propose a weakly supervised Hierarchical Multi-task Classification Framework (HMCF) to identify topics from customer questions at various granularities. Complexity lies in creating a list of granular topics (taxonomy) for 1000s of product categories and building a scalable classification system. To this end, we introduce a clustering based Taxonomy Creation and Data Labeling (TCDL) module for creating taxonomy and labelled data with minimal supervision. Using TCDL module, taxonomy and labelled data creation task reduces to 2 hours as compared to 2 weeks of manual efforts by a subject matter expert. For classification, we propose a two level HMCF that performs multi-class classification to identify coarse level-1 topic and leverages NLI based label-aware approach to identify granular level-2 topic. We showcase that HMCF (based on BERT and NLI) a) achieves absolute improvement of 13% in Top-1 accuracy over single-task non-hierarchical baselines b) learns a generic domain invariant function that can adapt to constantly evolving taxonomy (open label set) without need of re-training. c) reduces model deployment efforts significantly since it needs only one model that caters to 1000s of product categories.

We propose InsightNet, a novel approach for the automated extraction of structured insights from customer reviews. Our end-to-end machine learning framework is designed to overcome the limitations of current solutions, including the absence of structure for identified topics, non-standard aspect names, and lack of abundant training data. The proposed solution builds a semi-supervised multi-level taxonomy from raw reviews, a semantic similarity heuristic approach to generate labelled data and employs a multi-task insight extraction architecture by fine-tuning an LLM. InsightNet identifies granular actionable topics with customer sentiments and verbatim for each topic. Evaluations on real-world customer review data show that InsightNet performs better than existing solutions in terms of structure, hierarchy and completeness. We empirically demonstrate that InsightNet outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in multi-label topic classification, achieving an F1 score of 0.85, which is an improvement of 11% F1-score over the previous best results. Additionally, InsightNet generalises well for unseen aspects and suggests new topics to be added to the taxonomy.

Product question answering (PQA) aims to provide an instant response to customer questions posted on shopping message boards, social media, brand websites and retail stores. In this paper, we propose a distantly supervised solution to answer customer questions by using product information. Auto-answering questions using product information poses two main challenges:(i) labelled data is not readily available (ii)lengthy product information requires attending to various parts of the text to answer the question. To this end, we first propose a novel distant supervision based NLI model to prepare training data without any manual efforts. To deal with lengthy context, we factorize answer generation into two sub-problems. First, given product information, model extracts evidence spans relevant to question. Then, model leverages evidence spans to generate answer. Further, we propose two novelties in fine-tuning approach: (i) First, we jointly fine-tune model for both the tasks in end-to-end manner and showcase that it outperforms standard multi-task fine-tuning. (ii) Next, we introduce an auxiliary contrastive loss for evidence extraction. We show that combination of these two ideas achieves an absolute improvement of 6% in accuracy (human evaluation) over baselines.