Generating product descriptions from user reviews

Slava Novgorodov, Ido Guy, Guy Elad, Kira Radinsky

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

33 Scopus citations

Abstract

Product descriptions play an important role in the e-commerce ecosystem, conveying to buyers information about a merchandise they may purchase. Yet, on leading e-commerce websites, with high volumes of new items offered for sale every day, product descriptions are often lacking or missing altogether. Moreover, many descriptions include information that holds little value and sometimes even disrupts buyers, in an attempt to draw attention and purchases. In this work, we suggest to mitigate these issues by generating short crowd-based product descriptions from user reviews. We apply an extractive approach, where review sentences are used in their original form to compose the product description. At the core of our method is a supervised approach to identify candidate review sentences suitable to be used as part of a description. Our analysis, based on data from both the Fashion and Motors domains, reveals the top reasons for review sentences being unsuitable for the product's description and these are used, in turn, as part of a deep multi-task learning architecture. We then diversify the set of candidates by removing redundancies and, at the final step, select the top candidates to be included in the description. We compare different methods for each step and also conduct an end-to-end evaluation, based on rating from professional annotators, showing the generated descriptions are of high quality.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Web Conference 2019 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1354-1364
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781450366748
DOIs
StatePublished - 13 May 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event2019 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: 13 May 201917 May 2019

Publication series

NameThe Web Conference 2019 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019

Conference

Conference2019 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period13/05/1917/05/19

Keywords

  • Deep multi-task leaning
  • Electronic commerce
  • Language generation
  • User-generated content

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

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