Mian Ma


2022

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Automatic Scene-based Topic Channel Construction System for E-Commerce
Peng Lin | Yanyan Zou | Lingfei Wu | Mian Ma | Zhuoye Ding | Bo Long
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Scene marketing that well demonstrates user interests within a certain scenario has proved effective for offline shopping. To conduct scene marketing for e-commerce platforms, this work presents a novel product form, scene-based topic channel which typically consists of a list of diverse products belonging to the same usage scenario and a topic title that describes the scenario with marketing words. As manual construction of channels is time-consuming due to billions of products as well as dynamic and diverse customers’ interests, it is necessary to leverage AI techniques to automatically construct channels for certain usage scenarios and even discover novel topics. To be specific, we first frame the channel construction task as a two-step problem, i.e., scene-based topic generation and product clustering, and propose an E-commerce Scene-based Topic Channel construction system (i.e., ESTC) to achieve automated production, consisting of scene-based topic generation model for the e-commerce domain, product clustering on the basis of topic similarity, as well as quality control based on automatic model filtering and human screening. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B test validates the effectiveness of such a novel product form as well as the proposed system. In addition, we also introduce the experience of deploying the proposed system on a real-world e-commerce recommendation platform.

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Summarizing Dialogues with Negative Cues
Junpeng Liu | Yanyan Zou | Yuxuan Xi | Shengjie Li | Mian Ma | Zhuoye Ding
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Abstractive dialogue summarization aims to convert a long dialogue content into its short form where the salient information is preserved while the redundant pieces are ignored. Different from the well-structured text, such as news and scientific articles, dialogues often consist of utterances coming from two or more interlocutors, where the conversations are often informal, verbose, and repetitive, sprinkled with false-starts, backchanneling, reconfirmations, hesitations, speaker interruptions and the salient information is often scattered across the whole chat. The above properties of conversations make it difficult to directly concentrate on scattered outstanding utterances and thus present new challenges of summarizing dialogues. In this work, rather than directly forcing a summarization system to merely pay more attention to the salient pieces, we propose to explicitly have the model perceive the redundant parts of an input dialogue history during the training phase. To be specific, we design two strategies to construct examples without salient pieces as negative cues. Then, the sequence-to-sequence likelihood loss is cooperated with the unlikelihood objective to drive the model to focus less on the unimportant information and also pay more attention to the salient pieces. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our simple method significantly outperforms the baselines with regard to both semantic matching and factual consistent based metrics. The human evaluation also proves the performance gains.

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Interactive Latent Knowledge Selection for E-Commerce Product Copywriting Generation
Zeming Wang | Yanyan Zou | Yuejian Fang | Hongshen Chen | Mian Ma | Zhuoye Ding | Bo Long
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 5)

As the multi-modal e-commerce is thriving, high-quality advertising product copywriting has gain more attentions, which plays a crucial role in the e-commerce recommender, advertising and even search platforms. The advertising product copywriting is able to enhance the user experience by highlighting the product’s characteristics with textual descriptions and thus to improve the likelihood of user click and purchase. Automatically generating product copywriting has attracted noticeable interests from both academic and industrial communities, where existing solutions merely make use of a product’s title and attribute information to generate its corresponding description. However, in addition to the product title and attributes, we observe that there are various auxiliary descriptions created by the shoppers or marketers in the e-commerce platforms (namely human knowledge), which contains valuable information for product copywriting generation, yet always accompanying lots of noises. In this work, we propose a novel solution to automatically generating product copywriting that involves all the title, attributes and denoised auxiliary knowledge. To be specific, we design an end-to-end generation framework equipped with two variational autoencoders that works interactively to select informative human knowledge and generate diverse copywriting.