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, augmenting 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.

In this work we propose to adapt Learned Sparse Retrieval, an emerging approach in IR, to text-centric content-based recommendations, leveraging the strengths of transformer models for an efficient and interpretable user-item matching. We conduct extensive experiments, showing that our LSR-based recommender, dubbed STAR, outperforms existing dense bi-encoder baselines on three recommendation domains. The obtained word-level representations of users and items are easy to examine and result in over 10x more compact indexes.

This work presents a playground platform to demonstrate and interactively explore a suite of methods for utilizing user review texts to generate book recommendations. The focus is on search-based settings where the user provides situative context by focusing on a genre, a given item, her full user profile, or a newly formulated query. The platform allows exploration over two large datasets with various methods for creating concise user profiles.

Incorporating users' personal facts enhances the quality of many downstream services. Automated extraction of such personal knowledge has recently received considerable attention. However, often the operation of extraction models is not exposed to the user, making predictions inexplicable. In this work we present a web demonstration platform showcasing a recent personal knowledge extraction model, CHARM, which provides information on how the prediction was made and which data was decisive for it. Our demonstration explores two potential sources of input data: conversational transcripts and social media submissions.

Open-domain dialogue agents must be able to converse about many topics while incorporating knowledge about the user into the conversation. In this work we address the acquisition of such knowledge, for personalization in downstream Web applications, by extracting personal attributes from conversations. This problem is more challenging than the established task of information extraction from scientific publications or Wikipedia articles, because dialogues often give merely implicit cues about the speaker. We propose methods for inferring personal attributes, such as profession, age or family status, from conversations using deep learning. Specifically, we propose several Hidden Attribute Models, which are neural networks leveraging attention mechanisms and embeddings. Our methods are trained on a per-predicate basis to output rankings of object values for a given subject-predicate combination (e.g., ranking the doctor and nurse professions high when speakers talk about patients, emergency rooms, etc). Experiments with various conversational texts including Reddit discussions, movie scripts and a collection of crowdsourced personal dialogues demonstrate the viability of our methods and their superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.