Ireland

In a leading e-commerce business, we receive hundreds of millions of customer feedback from different text communication channels such as product reviews. The feedback can contain rich information regarding customers&#39; dissatisfaction in the quality of goods and services. To harness such information to better serve customers, in this paper, we created a machine learning approach to automatically identify product issues and uncover root causes from the customer feedback text. We identify issues at two levels: coarse grained (L-Coarse) and fine grained (L-Granular). We formulate this multi-level product issue identification problem as a seq2seq language generation problem. Specifically, we utilize transformer-based seq2seq models due to their versatility and strong transfer-learning capability. We demonstrate that our approach is label efficient and outperforms the traditional approach such as multi-class multi-label classification formulation. Based on human evaluation, our fine-tuned model achieves 82.1% and 95.4% human-level performance for L-Coarse and L-Granular issue identification, respectively. Furthermore, our experiments illustrate that the model can generalize to identify unseen L-Granular issues.

ACL 2022

Leveraging Seq2seq Language Generation for Multi-level Product Issue Identification

seq2seq languange generation

product issue identification

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

In a leading e-commerce business, we receive hundreds of millions of customer feedback from different text communication channels such as product reviews. The feedback can contain rich information regarding customers' dissatisfaction in the quality of goods and services. To harness such information to better serve customers, in this paper, we created a machine learning approach to automatically identify product issues and uncover root causes from the customer feedback text. We identify issues at two levels: coarse grained (L-Coarse) and fine grained (L-Granular). We formulate this multi-level product issue identification problem as a seq2seq language generation problem. Specifically, we utilize transformer-based seq2seq models due to their versatility and strong transfer-learning capability. We demonstrate that our approach is label efficient and outperforms the traditional approach such as multi-class multi-label classification formulation. Based on human evaluation, our fine-tuned model achieves 82.1% and 95.4% human-level performance for L-Coarse and L-Granular issue identification, respectively. Furthermore, our experiments illustrate that the model can generalize to identify unseen L-Granular issues.

workshop paper

This talk describes a novel framework to estimate the data quality of a collection of product descriptions to identify required relevant information for accurate product listing classification for tax-code assignment. Our Data Quality Estimation (DQE) framework consists of a Question Answering (QA) based attribute- value extraction model to identify missing at tributes and a classification model to identify bad quality records. In addition to identifying low- quality product listings, our framework can also generate a detailed report at a category level showing missing product information resulting in a better customer experience.

Data Quality Estimation Framework for Faster Tax Code Classification

Deep neural network models are especially susceptible to noise in annotated labels. In the real world, annotated data typically contains noise caused by a variety of factors such as task difficulty, annotator experience, and annotator bias. Label quality is critical for label validation tasks; however, correcting for noise by collecting more data is often costly. In this paper, we propose a contrastive meta-learning framework (CML) to address the challenges introduced by noisy annotated data, specifically in the context of natural language processing. CML combines contrastive and meta learning to improve the quality of text feature representations. Meta-learning is also used to generate confidence scores to assess label quality. We demonstrate that a model built on CML-filtered data outperforms a model built on clean data. Furthermore, we perform experiments on de- identified commercial voice assistant datasets and demonstrate that our model outperforms several SOTA approaches.

CML: A Contrastive Meta Learning Method to Estimate Human Label Confidence Scores and Reduce Data Collection Cost

We model product reviews to generate comparative responses consisting of positive and negative experiences regarding the product. Specifically, we generate a single sentence, comparative response from a given positive and a negative opinion. We contribute the first dataset for this task of Comparative Snippet Generation from contrasting opinions regarding a product, and a performance analysis of a pre-trained BERT model to generate such snippets.

Comparative Snippet Generation

Automatic monitoring systems for inappropriate user-generated messages have been found to be effective in reducing human operation costs in Consumer to Consumer (C2C) market- place services, in which customers send messages directly to other customers. We propose a lightweight neural network that takes a conversation as input, which we deployed to a production service. Our results show that the system reduced the human operation costs to less than one-sixth compared to the conventional rule-based monitoring at Mercari.

Textual Content Moderation in C2C Marketplace

We present a methodology to augment task-oriented dialogue systems with logical reasoning capabilities using pretrained language models. Our experiments indicate that using our proposed methodology transformer based models can be finetuned to perform logical reasoning to: answer questions when the dialogue context contains all the required information, otherwise extract appropriate constraints to pass to downstream components (e.g. a knowledge base) when only partial information is available.

Logical Reasoning for Task Oriented Dialogue Systems

Webpage information extraction (WIE) is an important step to create knowledge bases. For this, classical WIE methods leverage the Document Object Model (DOM) tree of a website. However, use of the DOM tree poses significant challenges as context and appearance are encoded in an abstract manner. To address this challenge we propose to reformulate WIE as a context-aware Webpage Object Detection task. Specifically, we develop a Context-aware Visual Attention-based (CoVA) detection pipeline which combines appearance features with syntactical structure from the DOM tree. To study the approach we collect a new large-scale datase of e-commerce websites for which we manually annotate every web element with four labels: product price, product title, product image and others. On this dataset we show that the proposed CoVA approach is a new challenging baseline which improves upon prior state-of-the-art methods.

CoVA: Context-aware Visual Attention for Webpage Information Extraction

Online marketplaces use attribute-value pairs, such as brand, size, size type, color, etc. to help define important and relevant facts about a listing. These help buyers to curate their search results using attribute filtering and overall create a richer experience. Although their critical importance for listings’ discoverability, getting sellers to input tens of different attribute-value pairs per listing is costly and often results in missing information. This can later translate to the unnecessary removal of relevant listings from the search results when buyers are filtering by attribute values. In this paper we demonstrate using a Text-to-Text hierarchical multi-label ranking model framework to predict the most relevant attributes per listing, along with their expected values, using historic user behavioral data. This solution helps sellers by allowing them to focus on verifying information on attributes that are likely to be used by buyers, and thus, increase the expected recall for their listings. Specifically for eBay’s case we show that using this model can improve the relevancy of the attribute extraction process by 33.2% compared to the current highly-optimized production system. Apart from the empirical contribution, the highly generalized nature of the framework presented in this paper makes it relevant for many high-volume search-driven websites.

Product Titles-to-Attributes As a Text-to-Text Task

Although most studies have treated attribute value extraction (AVE) as named entity recognition, these approaches are not practical in real-world e-commerce platforms because they perform poorly, and require canonicalization of extracted values. Furthermore, since values needed for actual services is static in many attributes, extraction of new values is not always necessary. Given the above, we formalize AVE as extreme multi-label classification (XMC). A major problem in solving AVE as XMC is that the distribution between positive and negative labels for products is heavily imbalanced. To mitigate the negative impact derived from such biased distribution, we propose label masking, a simple and effective method to reduce the number of negative labels in training. We exploit attribute taxonomy designed for e-commerce platforms to determine which labels are negative for products. Experimental results using a dataset collected from a Japanese e-commerce platform demonstrate that the label masking improves micro and macro F1 scores by 3.38 and 23.20 points, respectively.

Extreme Multi-Label Classification with Label Masking for Product Attribute Value Extraction

We demonstrate that knowledge distillation can be used not only to reduce model size, but to simultaneously adapt a contextual language model to a specific domain. We use Multilingual BERT (mBERT; Devlin et al., 2019) as a starting point and follow the knowledge distillation approach of (Sahn et al., 2019) to train a smaller multilingual BERT model that is adapted to the domain at hand. We show that for in-domain tasks, the domain-specific model shows on average 2.3% improvement in F1 score, relative to a model distilled on domain-general data. Whereas much previous work with BERT has fine-tuned the encoder weights during task training, we show that the model improvements from distillation on in-domain data persist even when the encoder weights are frozen during task training, allowing a single encoder to support classifiers for multiple tasks and languages.

Domain-specific knowledge distillation yields smaller and better models for conversational commerce

Extracting attribute-value information from unstructured product descriptions continue to be of a vital importance in e-commerce applications. One of the most important product attributes is the brand which highly influences costumers' purchasing behaviour. Thus, it is crucial to accurately extract brand information dealing with the main challenge of discovering new brand names. Under the open world assumption, several approaches have adopted deep learning models to extract attribute-values using sequence tagging paradigm. However, they did not employ finer grained data representations such as character level embeddings which improve generalizability. In this paper, we introduce OpenBrand, a novel approach for discovering brand names. OpenBrand is a BiLSTM-CRF-Attention model with embeddings at different granularities. Such embeddings are learned using CNN and LSTM architectures to provide more accurate representations. We further propose a new dataset for brand value extraction, with a very challenging task on zero-shot extraction. We have tested our approach, through extensive experiments, and shown that it outperforms state-of-the-art models in brand name discovery.

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