Text-Based Product Matching with Incomplete and Inconsistent Items Descriptions

Szymon Lukasik, Andrzej Michalowski, Piotr A. Kowalski, Amir H. Gandomi

Abstract: In recent years Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are reshaping the landscape of e-commerce and retail. Using advanced analytics, behavioral modeling, and inference, representatives of these industries can leverage collected data and increase their market performance. To perform assortment optimization – one of the most fundamentals problems in retail – one has to identify products that are present in the competitors’ portfolios. It is not possible without effective product matching. The paper deals with finding identical products in the offer of different retailers. The task is performed using a text-mining approach, assuming that the data may contain incomplete information. Besides the description of the algorithm, the results for real-world data fetched from the offers of two consumer electronics retailers are being demonstrated.