TaoType: Predicting Fine-Grained Typing Intent for Faster Search

Yipeng Yu, Yichen Yuan, Chengxiao Feng, Xu Liu

Keywords: Query, Search, Typing, Response time, E-commerce, CRF, Behavior, Micro signal, Preload, Presearch, APP intelligence

TL;DR: TaoType for faster search in e-commerce

Abstract: "Is the user’s current query input exactly what they intend to search for?" Our work aims to answer this question by determining, at each typing, whether the current query is complete. If so, a search is implicitly triggered in advance without waiting for user confirmation. This approach reduces response time and enhances the user search experience. Specifically, we propose TaoType, a client-side framework that introduces innovation in data sampling, feature selection, model design and training, and online strategy. Experiments in a leading mobile shopping application named Taobao validate its effectiveness, achieving offline precision/recall/accuracy of 0.7936/0.8196/0.7742, respectively, and decreasing online response time by 640.51±93.65 milliseconds, which is of great benefit to the search system. Unlike prior work that focuses on optimizing server-side engineering pipelines or simplifying ranking models, our method leverages client-side typing behavior for real-time early prediction, utilizing on-device computation to gain response time reducing. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to identify and address this problem. This work also introduces App Intelligence, a new paradigm for enhancing mobile applications by integrating on-device AI to boost business value and user experience.

Submission Type: Deployed

Submission Number: 32