Synonym Expansion for Large Shopping Taxonomies

Adrian Boteanu, Adam Kiezun, Shay Artzi

Keywords: Ontology, Taxonomy, Synonym, Shopping, Search

TL;DR: We use machine learning to generate synonyms for large shopping taxonomies.

Abstract: We present an approach for expanding taxonomies with synonyms, or aliases. We target large shopping taxonomies, with thousands of nodes. A comprehensive set of entity aliases is an important component of identifying entities in unstructured text such as product reviews or search queries. Our method consists of two stages: we generate synonym candidates from WordNet and shopping search queries, then use a binary classifier to filter candidates. We process taxonomies with thousands of synonyms in order to generate over 90,000 synonyms. We show that using the taxonomy to derive contextual features improves classification performance over using features from the target node alone.We show that our approach has potential for transfer learning between different taxonomy domains, which reduces the need to collect training data for new taxonomies.

Archival Status: Archival

Subject Areas: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Applications: Other