What is in a title? Characterizing product titles in e-commerce

Sharon Hirsch, Ido Guy, Slava Novgorodov, Gal Lavee, Bracha Shapira

Abstract: Product titles play a central role in connecting e-commerce buyers and sellers, concisely conveying the product information required to facilitate a transaction. Product titles are prominently presented in e-commerce search results, recommendations, and browse pages. In addition, many e-commerce tasks, such as matching, categorization, and product recommendations, heavily rely on product titles as a signal. In this paper, we report a comprehensive analysis of the linguistic characteristics of e-commerce titles. Specifically, we consider syntax, content, order of words, and attribute distribution. We compare these characteristics to those of the language used in other e-commerce and web corpora. Our analysis reveals a variety of unique properties of e-commerce title language. We consider the practical implications of our analysis with an empirical evaluation of modeling approaches on two real-world e-commerce tasks directly involving titles. Our findings suggest a number of practical approaches to applying natural language processing techniques over e-commerce titles. Based on these findings, we developed a set of clear, actionable guidelines for creating effective titles that can be adapted by e-commerce platforms.