Context-Aware Query Rewriting for Improving Users' Search Experience on E-commerce Websites

Anonymous

Abstract: E-commerce queries are often short and ambiguous. E-commerce query understanding often uses query rewriting to disambiguate user-input queries. While using e-commerce search tools, users tend to enter multiple searches, which we call context, before purchasing. These history searches contain contextual insights about users' true shopping intents. Therefore, modeling such contextual information is critical to a better query rewriting model. However, existing query rewriting models ignore users' history behaviors and consider only the instant search query, which is often a short string offering limited information about the true shopping intent.We propose an end-to-end context-aware query rewriting model to bridge this gap, which takes the search context into account. Specifically, our model builds a session graph using the history search queries, their contained words, and auxiliary category information. We then employ a weighted graph attention mechanism that models cross-query relations and computes contextual information of the session. The model subsequently calculates session representations by combining the contextual information with the instant search query using an aggregation network. The session representations are then decoded to generate rewritten queries. Empirically, we demonstrate the superiority of our method to state-of-the-art approaches under various evaluation metrics. Our code and data will be publicly available.

Paper Type: long