Buyer intent in e-commerce is multi-faceted and is expressed through explicit attributes—such as brand, size, color, and material, rather than through general topical relevance. However, many state-of-the-art scalable query-product matching systems rely on aggregate representations, scoring a single query embedding against a single item embedding. While efficient, this aggregation frequently fails to satisfy individual attribute intent: items can be semantically related, yet violate key aspects specified in the query. In contrast, fine-grained interaction methods can better capture aspect-level constraints, but are typically too expensive due to increased run-time computation and storage costs. We propose an aspect-aware ranking framework that retrieves and resolves aspects in queries and performs fine-grained semantic affinity match against aspects in products to compute an aggregate query-product level aspect affinity score. The proposed approach integrates (i) query aspect resolution (canonicalization) using structured aspect data, (ii) a model to learn granular aspect affinity signal capturing individual aspect-level understanding; and iii) an efficient design for online serving, significantly cutting cost associated with inference speed and storage. This design preserves the scalability of two-tower retrieval while substantially improving explicit intent satisfaction.

In e-commerce shopping, aligning search results with a buyer's immediate needs and preferences presents a significant challenge, particularly in adapting search results throughout the buyer's shopping journey as they move from the initial stages of browsing to making a purchase decision or shift from one intent to another. This study presents a systematic approach to adapting e-commerce search results based on the current context. We start with basic methods and incrementally incorporate more contextual information and state-of-the-art techniques to improve the search outcomes. By applying this evolving contextual framework to items displayed on the search engine results page (SERP), we progressively align search outcomes more closely with the buyer's interests and current search intentions. Our findings demonstrate that this incremental enhancement, from simple heuristic autoregressive features to advanced sequence models, significantly improves ranker performance. The integration of contextual techniques enhances the performance of our production ranker, leading to improved search results in both offline and online A/B testing in terms of Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). Overall, the paper details iterative methodologies and their substantial contributions to search result contextualization on e-commerce platforms.

Content is one of the most essential parts of products on e-commerce websites such as eBay. It not only drives user-engagement but also traffic from various search engine websites based on the relevance. Generating the content for the products, however comes with a wide set of challenges, due to the complexity of commerce at scale, and requires new applications in text processing and information extraction to address some core issues. Some of the factors which need to be addressed are: scalability (millions of products), dynamism (products change with time), removal of item-specific or seller specific information (maintain generality), size of the content etc. Generally, curators are hired for writing the product descriptions manually, which is not cost-effective and is not scalable. In the current work, an algorithmic framework based on Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning is proposed and used to generate the content for ecommerce products. Seller descriptions for multiple items aggregated at a product level are used for content generation. Furthermore, a combination of behavioral and text signals such as search queries are also used to understand the user intent. Two different approaches are proposed in this work: Extraction (sentence retrieval) and Abstraction (sentence generation). The results of both the methods are analyzed and it is depicted that algorithmic content generation is scalable, fast and has potential to cut down the manualcuration cost dramatically.

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Dialog act (DA) classification is useful to understand the intentions of a human speaker. An effective classification of DA can be exploited for realistic implementation of expert systems. In this work, we investigate DA classification using both acoustic and discourse information for HCRC MapTask data. We extract several different acoustic features and exploit these features using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) network to classify acoustic information. For discourse feature extraction, we propose a novel parts-of-speech (POS) tagging technique that effectively reduces the dimensionality of discourse features. To classify discourse information, we exploit two classifiers such as a HMM and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We further obtain classifier fusion between HMM and SVM to improve discourse classification. Finally, we perform an efficient decision-level classifier fusion for both acoustic and discourse information to classify 12 different DAs in MapTask data. We obtain 65.2% and 55.4% DA classification rates using acoustic and discourse information, respectively. Furthermore, we obtain combined accuracy of 68.6% for DA classification using both acoustic and discourse information. These accuracy rates of DA classification are either comparable or better than previously reported results for the same data set. For average precision and recall, we obtain accuracy rates of 74.89% and 69.83%, respectively. Therefore, we obtain much better precision and recall rates for most of the classified DAs when compared to existing works on the same HCRC MapTask data set.

In this work, we characterize genes using an oligonucleotide affymetrix gene expression dataset and propose a novel gene selection method based on samples from the posterior distributions of class-specific gene expression measures. We construct a hierarchical Bayesian framework for a random effect ANOVA model that allows us to obtain the posterior distributions of the class-specific gene expressions. We also formalize a novel class prediction scheme based on the samples from new posterior distributions of group specific gene expressions. Our experimental results show the class-discriminating power of the selected genes. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our prediction scheme classifies tissue samples into appropriate treatment groups with high accuracy. The computations are implemented by using Gibbs sampling. We compare the efficacy of our proposed gene selection and prediction methods with that of Pomeroy et. al (Nature, 2002) on the same CNS tumor sample dataset.