Locale-aware product type prediction for e-commerce search queries

Search query understanding (QU) is an important building block of the modern e-commerce search engines. QU extracts multiple intents from customer queries, including intended color, brand, etc. One of the most important tasks in QU is predicting which product category the user is interested in.

In our work we are tapping into query product type classification (Q2PT) task. Compared to classification of full-fledged texts, Q2PT is more complicated because of the ambiguity of short search queries, which is aggravated by language and cultural differences in worldwide online stores. Moreover, the span and variety of product categories in modern marketplaces pose a significant challenge.

We focus on Q2PT inference in the global multi-locale e-commerce markets, which need to deliver high quality user experience in both large and small local stores alike. The common approach of training Q2PT models for each locale separately shows significant performance drops in low-resource stores and prevents from easily expanding to a new country, where the Q2PT model has to be created from scratch.

We use transfer learning to address this challenge, augment-ing low-resource locales through the vast knowledge of the high-resource ones. We introduce a unified, locale-aware Q2PT model, sharing training data and model structure across worldwide stores.

We show that the proposed unified locale-aware Q2PT model has superior performance over the alternatives by conducting extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis on the large-scale multilingual e-commerce dataset across 20 worldwide locales. Our online A/B tests have shown that using locale-aware model improves over the previous user experience, increasing customer satisfaction.