Online sellers and advertisers are recommended keyphrases for their listed products, which they bid on to enhance their sales. One popular paradigm that generates such recommendations is Extreme Multi-Label Classification (XMC), which involves tagging/mapping keyphrases to items. We outline the limitations of training XMC models on click data for keyphrase recommendations on E-Commerce platforms. We introduce GraphEx, an innovative graph-based approach that recommends keyphrases to sellers using extraction of token permutations from item titles. Additionally, we demonstrate traditional metrics such as precision/recall isn't reliable on click-based data in practical applications, thereby necessitating a robust framework to evaluate performance in real-world scenarios. Our evaluation is designed to assess the relevance of keyphrases to items and the potential for buyer outreach. GraphEx outperforms production models at eBay, achieving the objectives mentioned above. It supports near real-time inferencing in resource-constrained production environments and scales effectively for billions of items.

We consider a supervised classification problem of categorizing e-commerce products based on just the words in the title. If done in real-time, the categorization can greatly benefit sellers by enabling them to offer immediate feedback. We present a deterministic algorithm by constructing weighted word co-occurrence graphs from the listing/item titles. We empirically evaluate this algorithm on two publicly available product listing datasets, Etsy and Amazon. Our method’s accuracy is comparable to that of a supervised classifier constructed using the fastText library. The inference time of our model is up to 2.9× faster than the fastText classifier and has small training times. The training and inference of our model scales well for big datasets performing large-scale classification on millions of listings. We perform a detailed analysis and provide insights into our method and the product categorization task.

Keyphrase Recommendation has been a pivotal problem in advertising and e-commerce where advertisers/sellers are recommended keyphrases (search queries) to bid on to increase their sales. It is a challenging task due to the plethora of items shown on online platforms and various possible queries that users search while showing varying interest in the displayed items. Moreover, query/keyphrase recommendations need to be made in real-time and in a resource-constrained environment. This problem can be framed as an Extreme Multi-label (XML) Short text classification by tagging the input text with keywords as labels. Traditional neural network models are either infeasible or have slower inference latency due to large label spaces. We present Graphite, a graph-based classifier model that provides real-time keyphrase recommendations that are on par with standard text classification models. Furthermore, it doesn’t utilize GPU resources, which can be limited in production environments. Due to its lightweight nature and smaller footprint, it can train on very large datasets, where state-of-the-art XML models fail due to extreme resource requirements. Graphite is deterministic, transparent, and intrinsically more interpretable than neural network-based models. We present a comprehensive analysis of our model’s performance across forty categories spanning eBay’s English-speaking sites.

We present ParHDE, a shared-memory parallelization of the High-Dimensional Embedding (HDE) graph algorithm. Originally proposed as a graph drawing algorithm, HDE characterizes the global structure of a graph and is closely related to spectral graph computations such as computing the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian. We identify compute- and memory-intensive steps in HDE and parallelize these steps for efficient execution on shared-memory multicore platforms. ParHDE can process graphs with billions of edges in minutes, is up to 18 × faster than a prior parallel implementation of HDE, and achieves up to a 24 × relative speedup on a 28-core system. We also implement several extensions of ParHDE and demonstrate its utility in diverse graph computation-related applications.