MSRA: A Multi-Aspect Semantic Relevance Approach for E-Commerce via Multimodal Pre-Training

Hanqi Jin, Jiwei Tan, Lixin Liu, Lisong Qiu, Shaowei Yao, Xi Chen, Xiaoyi Zeng

Abstract: To enhance the effectiveness of matching user requests with millions of online products, practitioners invest significant efforts in developing semantic relevance models on large-scale e-commerce platforms. Generally, such semantic relevance models are formulated as text-matching approaches, which measure the relevance between users' search queries and the titles of candidate items (i.e., products). However, we argue that conventional relevance methods may lead to sub-optimal performance due to the limited information provided by the titles of candidate items. To alleviate this issue, we suggest incorporating additional information about candidate items from multiple aspects, including their attributes and images. This could supplement the information that may not be fully provided by titles alone. To this end, we propose a multi-aspect semantic relevance model that takes into account the match between search queries and the title, attribute and image information of items simultaneously. The model is further enhanced through pre-training using several well-designed self-supervised and weakly-supervised tasks. Furthermore, the proposed model is fine-tuned using annotated data and distilled into a representation-based architecture for efficient online deployment. Experimental results show the proposed approach significantly improves relevance and leads to considerable enhancements in business metrics.