E-commerce platforms in emerging markets often operate with underdeveloped product catalogs that contain only category taxonomies but lack structured attribute schemas. This absence of fine-grained product attributes limits search capabilities---preventing faceted filtering, degrading query understanding, and weakening semantic representations used by search systems. We present BEATS, a human-in-the-loop LLM framework for bootstrapping product attribute taxonomies entirely from scratch. Our approach extends a multi-stage LLM generation pipeline with two critical production stages: (1) proactive quality checking by model developers to filter erroneous outputs, and (2) human annotation by domain-expert local staff to validate generated attributes. The framework operates iteratively---prompts at each generation stage are refined based on quality check observations and annotator feedback across successive rounds, progressively improving attribute quality. Once the attribute taxonomy is established, we employ LLMs to perform structured attribute tagging on individual product items, enriching their contextual representations. The enriched catalog directly benefits multiple components of the search system: enabling granular attribute-based filtering, providing structured features for ranking models, and improving semantic representations for dense retrieval. We validate the generated taxonomy by training dense retrieval models on attribute-enriched product data, demonstrating consistent improvements over baselines using original catalog information. Our system has been deployed at Rakuten Taiwan, enriching 9 major categories spanning 2,694 sub-categories with 67,277 generated attributes, and over 5.4 million products have been tagged with the generated attributes, with plans to enrich the entire product catalog.

Recently, Transformer has been demonstrating promising performance in many NLP tasks and showing a trend of replacing Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Meanwhile, less attention is drawn to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) due to its weak ability in capturing sequential and long-distance dependencies, although it has excellent local feature extraction capability. In this paper, we introduce an Attentive Convolutional Transformer (ACT) that takes the advantages of both Transformer and CNN for efficient text classification. Specifically, we propose a novel attentive convolution mechanism that utilizes the semantic meaning of convolutional filters attentively to transform text from complex word space to a more informative convolutional filter space where important n-grams are captured. ACT is able to capture both local and global dependencies effectively while preserving sequential information. Experiments on various text classification tasks and detailed analyses show that ACT is a lightweight, fast, and effective universal text classifier, outperforming CNNs, RNNs, and attentive models including Transformer.

Recent question generation (QG) approaches often utilize the sequence-to-sequence framework (Seq2Seq) to optimize the log-likelihood of ground-truth questions using teacher forcing.However, this training objective is inconsistent with actual question quality, which is often reflected by certain global properties such as whether the question can be answered by the document.As such, we directly optimize for QG-specific objectives via reinforcement learning to improve question quality.We design three different rewards that target to improve the fluency, relevance, and answerability of generated questions.We conduct both automatic and human evaluations in addition to a thorough analysis to explore the effect of each QG-specific reward.We find that optimizing question-specific rewards generally leads to better performance in automatic evaluation metrics.However, only the rewards that correlate well with human judgement (e.g., relevance) lead to real improvement in question quality.Optimizing for the others, especially answerability, introduces incorrect bias to the model, resulting in poor question quality.

The good generalization performance of conventional pattern classifiers often relies on the size of training data labeled by costly human labor. These days, publicly available web resources grow explosively, and this allows us to easily obtain abundant and cheap web data. Yet, web data are usually not as cooperative as human labeled data. In this paper, we explore the use of web text data to aid image classification. Without requiring the previous collection of auxiliary data from the web, we directly retrieve the web text information with the aid of the powerful reverse image search engine. We develop a novel textual modeling method namedsemantic matching neural network(SMNN) that is capable of learning semantic features from the associated text of web images. The SMNN text features have improved reliability and applicability, compared to the text features obtained from other methods. The SMNN text features and convolutional neural network (CNN) visual features are merged into a shared representation, which learns to capture the correlations between the two modalities. Experimental results on benchmark UIUC-Sports, Scene-15, Caltech-256, and Pascal VOC-2012 data sets show that the visual and text modalities of data from different sources are remarkably complementary and the fusion of them achieves substantial performance improvement.

With the exponential growth of web meta-data, exploiting multimodal online sources via standard search engine has become a trend in visual recognition as it effectively alleviates the shortage of training data. However, the web meta-data such as text data is usually not as cooperative as expected due to its unstructured nature. To address this problem, this paper investigates the numerical representation of web text data. We firstly adopt convolutional neural network (CNN) for web text modeling on top of word vectors. Combined with CNN for image, we present a multimodal fusion to maximize the discriminative power of visual and textual modality data for decision level and feature level simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves significant improvement in large-scale image classification on Pascal VOC-2007 and VOC-2012 datasets.