Ireland

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&#39; 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.

ACL 2022

OpenBrand: Open Brand Value Extraction from Product Descriptions

attribute value extraction

zero-shot learning

sequence tagging

# 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). 

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.

workshop paper

Noisy labels in large E-commerce product data (i.e., product items are placed into incorrect categories) is a critical issue for product categorization task because they are unavoidable, non-trivial to remove and degrade prediction performance significantly. Training a product title classification model which is robust to noisy labels in the data is very important to make product classification applications more practical. In this paper, we study the impact of instance-dependent noise to performance of product title classification by comparing our data denoising algorithm and different noise-resistance training algorithms which were designed to prevent a classifier model from over-fitting to noise. We develop a simple yet effective Deep Neural Network for product title classification to use as a base classifier. Along with recent methods of stimulating instance-dependent noise, we propose a novel noise stimulation algorithm based on product title similarity. Our experiments cover multiple datasets, various noise methods and different training solutions. Results uncover the limit of classification task when noise rate is not negligible and data distribution is highly skewed.

Robust Product Classification with Instance-Dependent Noise

The automated analysis of Terms and Conditions has gained attention in recent years, mainly due to its relevance to consumer protection. Well-structured data sets are the base for every analysis. While content extraction, in general, is a well-researched field and many open source libraries are available, our evaluation shows, that existing solutions cannot extract Terms and Conditions in sufficient quality, mainly because of their special structure. In this paper, we present an approach to extract the content and hierarchy of Terms and Conditions from German and English online shops. Our evaluation shows, that the approach outperforms the current state of the art. A python implementation of the approach is made available under an open license.

Structured Extraction of Terms and Conditions from German and English Online Shops

Product discovery is a crucial component for online shopping. However, item-to-item recommendations today do not allow users to explore changes along selected dimensions: given a query item, can a model suggest something similar but in a different color? We consider item recommendations of the comparative nature (e.g. ``something darker'') and show how CLIP-based models can support this use case in a zero-shot manner.

''Does it come in black?'' CLIP-like models are zero-shot recommenders

Many e-commerce websites provide Product-related Question Answering (PQA) platform where potential customers can ask questions related to a product, and other consumers can post an answer to that question based on their experience. Recently, there has been a growing interest in providing automated responses to product questions. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of the generative approach for PQA. We use state-of-the-art generative models proposed by Deng et al.(2020) and Lu et al.(2020) for this purpose. On closer examination, we find several drawbacks in this approach: (1) input reviews are not always utilized significantly for answer generation, (2) the performance of the models is abysmal while answering the numerical questions, (3) many of the generated answers contain phrases like ``I do not know'' which are taken from the reference answer in training data, and these answers do not convey any information to the customer. Although these approaches achieve a high ROUGE score, it does not reflect upon these shortcomings of the generated answers. We hope that our analysis will lead to more rigorous PQA approaches, and future research will focus on addressing these shortcomings in PQA.

Investigating the Generative Approach for Question Answering in E-Commerce

Item categorization (IC) is a core natural language processing (NLP) task in e-commerce. As a special text classification task, fine-tuning pre-trained models, e.g., BERT, has become a mainstream solution. To improve IC performance further, other product metadata, e.g., product images, have been used. Although multimodal IC (MIC) systems show higher performance, expanding from processing text to more resource-demanding images brings large engineering impacts and hinders the deployment of such dual-input MIC systems. In this paper, we proposed a new way of using product images to improve text-only IC model: leveraging cross-modal signals between products' titles and associated images to adapt BERT models in a self-supervised learning (SSL) way. Our experiments on the three genres in the public Amazon product dataset show that the proposed method generates improved prediction accuracy and macro-F1 values than simply using the original BERT. Moreover, the proposed method is able to keep using existing text-only IC inference implementation and shows a resource advantage than the deployment of a dual-input MIC system.

Utilizing Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning to Improve Item Categorization BERT Model

Recently, semantic search has been successfully applied to e-commerce product search and the learned semantic space(s) for query and product encoding are expected to generalize to unseen queries or products. Yet, whether generalization can conveniently emerge has not been thoroughly studied in the domain thus far. In this paper, we examine several general-domain and domain specific pretrained Roberta variants and discover that general domain fine-tuning does not help generalization, which aligns with the discovery of prior art. Proper domain-specific fine-tuning with clickstream data can lead to better model generalization, based on a bucketed analysis of a publicly available manual annotated query-product pair data.

Towards Generalizeable Semantic Product Search by Text Similarity Pre-training on Search Click Logs

The term \textit{lot} in \ecom is defined to mean an offering that contains a collection of multiple identical items for sale. In a large online marketplace, lot offerings play an important role, allowing buyers and sellers to set price levels to optimally balance supply and demand needs. In spite of their central role, \ecom platforms often struggle to identify lot offerings, since explicit lot status identification is frequently not provided by sellers. The ability to identify lot offerings plays a key role in many fundamental \ecom tasks, from matching offerings to catalog products, through ranking \ecom search results, to providing effective pricing guidance. In this work, we seek to determine the lot status (and lot size) of each offering, in order to facilitate an improved buyer experience, while reducing the friction for sellers posting new offerings. We demonstrate experimentally the ability to accurately classify offerings as lots and predict their lot size using only the offer title, by adapting state-of-the-art natural language techniques to the lot identification problem.

 Lot or Not: Identifying Multi-Quantity Offerings in E-Commerce

We build a system that leverages adapters, a light weight and efficient method for leveraging large language models to perform the task Empathy and Distress prediction tasks for WASSA 2022. In our experiments, we find that stacking our empathy and distress adapters on a pre-trained emotion classification adapter performs best compared to full fine-tuning approaches and emotion feature concatenation. We make our experimental code publicly available here: https://github.com/caisa-lab/wassa-empathy-adapters

CAISA at WASSA 2022: Adapter-Tuning for Empathy Prediction

This paper critically examines the current practices of benchmark dataset sharing in NLP and suggests a better way to inform reusers of the benchmark dataset. As the dataset sharing platform plays a key role not only in distributing the dataset but also in informing the potential reusers about the dataset, we believe data-sharing platforms should provide a comprehensive context of the datasets. We survey four benchmark dataset sharing platforms: HuggingFace, PaperswithCode, Tensorflow, and Pytorch to diagnose the current practices of how the dataset is shared which metadata is shared and omitted. To be specific, drawing on the concept of data curation which considers the future reuse when the data is made public, we advance the direction that benchmark dataset sharing platforms should take into consideration. We identify that four benchmark platforms have different practices of using metadata and there is a lack of consensus on what social impact metadata is. We believe the problem of missing a discussion around social impact in the dataset sharing platforms has to do with the failed agreement on who should be in charge. We propose that the benchmark dataset should develop social impact metadata and data curator should take a role in managing the social impact metadata.

Raison d'être of the benchmark dataset: A Survey of Current Practices of Benchmark Dataset Sharing Platforms

A user-generated text on social media enables health workers to keep track of information, identify possible outbreaks, forecast disease trends, monitor emergency cases, and ascertain disease awareness and response to official health correspondence. This exchange of health information on social media has been regarded as an attempt to enhance public health surveillance (PHS). Despite its potential, the technology is still in its early stages and is not ready for widespread application. Advancements in pretrained language models (PLMs) have facilitated the development of several domain-specific PLMs and a variety of downstream applications. However, there are no PLMs for social media tasks involving PHS. We present and release PHS-BERT, a transformer-based PLM, to identify tasks related to public health surveillance on social media. We compared and benchmarked the performance of PHS-BERT on 25 datasets from different social medial platforms related to 7 different PHS tasks. Compared with existing PLMs that are mainly evaluated on limited tasks, PHS-BERT achieved state-of-the-art performance on all 25 tested datasets, showing that our PLM is robust and generalizable in the common PHS tasks. By making PHS-BERT available, we aim to facilitate the community to reduce the computational cost and introduce new baselines for future works across various PHS-related tasks.

OpenBrand: Open Brand Value Extraction from Product Descriptions

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