Stephan Walter

Author directory

2026

E-commerce product titles often include redundant information that negatively impacts the user experience. Removing repeated words through restructuring and paraphrasing can make titles more concise and improve readability. While large language models can optimize titles, their computational cost makes them impractical for large-scale applications. In this paper, we first analyze the sources of repetition in multilingual product titles, then present LocRegen, a system that uses smaller language models to efficiently remove redundancies while preserving essential product attributes. Our experiments across five languages show that LocRegen with a 7B model substantially outperforms a 47B mixture-of-experts model: LocRegen achieves a 2.4% redundant title rate compared to 3.5% for the 47B model, and maintains a 3.8% overall error rate across all error categories including key product attribute omission compared to 8.4% for the 47B model. These results demonstrate that LocRegen delivers superior performance on cost-effective hardware with acceptable latency, making it practical for large-scale deployment where much larger models would be computationally prohibitive.

2025

E-commerce stores increasingly use Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance catalog data quality through automated regeneration. A critical challenge is accurately predicting missing structured attribute values across multilingual product catalogs, where LLM performance varies significantly by language. While existing approaches leverage general knowledge through prompt engineering and external retrieval, more effective and accurate signals for attribute prediction can exist within the catalog ecosystem itself-similar products often share consistent patterns and structural relationships, and may have the missing attributes filled. Therefore, this paper introduces PatternRAG, a novel retrieval-augmented system that strategically leverages existing product catalog entries to guide LLM predictions for missing attributes. Our approach introduces a multi-stage retrieval framework that progressively refines the search space based on product type, uses textual similarity, glance views and brand relationships to identify the most relevant attribute-filled examples for LLM prediction guidance. Experiments on test sets across three major e-commerce stores in different languages (US, DE, FR) demonstrate substantial improvements in catalog data quality, achieving up to 34% increase in recall and 0.8% in precision for attribute value prediction. At catalog entry level, it also achieves up to +43.32% increase in completeness and up to +2.83% in correctness.

2024

Making product titles informative and concise is vital to delighting e-commerce customers. Recent advances have successfully applied monolingual product title summarization to shorten lengthy product titles. This paper explores the cross-lingual product title generation task that summarizes and translates the source language product title to a shortened product title in the target language. Our main contributions are as follows, (i) we investigate the optimal product title length within the scope of e-commerce localization, (ii) we introduce a simple yet effective data filtering technique to train a length-aware machine translation system and compare it to a publicly available LLM, (iii) we propose an automatic approach to validate experimental results using an open-source LLM without human input and show that these evaluation results are consistent with human preferences.

2023

In the realm of e-commerce, it is crucial to ensure consistent localization of brand terms in product information translations. With the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape, new brands and their localized versions are consistently emerging. However, these diverse brand forms and aliases present a significant challenge in machine translation (MT). This study investigates MT brand consistency problem in multilingual e-commerce and proposes practical and sustainable solutions to maintain brand consistency in various scenarios within the e-commerce industry. Through experimentation and analysis of an English-Arabic MT system, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.
Meeting the expectations of e-commerce customers involves offering a seamless online shopping experience in their preferred language. To achieve this, modern e-commerce platforms rely on machine translation systems to provide multilingual product information on a large scale. However, maintaining high-quality machine translation that can keep up with the ever-expanding volume of product data remains an open challenge for industrial machine translation systems. In this context, topical clustering emerges as a valuable approach, leveraging latent signals and interpretable textual patterns to potentially enhance translation quality and facilitate industry-scale translation data discovery. This paper proposes two innovative methods: topic-based data selection and topic-signal augmentation, both utilizing latent topic clusters to improve the quality of machine translation in e-commerce. Furthermore, we present a data discovery workflow that utilizes topic clusters to effectively manage the growing multilingual product catalogs, addressing the challenges posed by their expansion.
Product information in e-commerce is usually localized using machine translation (MT) systems. Arabic language has rich morphology and dialectal variations, so Arabic MT in e-commerce training requires a larger volume of data from diverse data sources; Given the dynamic nature of e-commerce, such data needs to be acquired periodically to update the MT. Consequently, validating the quality of training data periodically within an industrial setting presents a notable challenge. Meanwhile, the performance of MT systems is significantly impacted by the quality and appropriateness of the training data. Hence, this study first examines the Arabic MT in e-commerce and investigates the data quality challenges for English-Arabic MT in e-commerce then proposes heuristics-based and topic-based data selection approaches to improve MT for product information. Both online and offline experiment results have shown our proposed approaches are effective, leading to improved shopping experiences for customers.

2008

This paper discusses the use of computational linguistic technology to extract definitions from a large corpus of German court decisions. We present a corpus-based survey of definition structures used in this kind of document. We then evaluate the results of a definition extraction system that uses patterns identified in this survey to extract from dependency parsed text. We show how an automatically induced ranking function improves the quality of the search results of this system, and we discuss methods for the acquisition of further extraction rules.

2006