Learning a Hierarchical Embedding Model for Personalized Product Search

Abstract

Product search is an important part of online shopping. In contrast to many search tasks, the objectives of product search are not confined to retrieving relevant products. Instead, it focuses on finding items that satisfy the needs of individuals and lead to a user purchase. The unique characteristics of product search make search personalization essential for both customers and e-shopping companies. Purchase behavior is highly personal in online shopping and users often provide rich feedback about their decisions (e.g. product reviews). However, the severe mismatch found in the language of queries, products and users make traditional retrieval models based on bag-of-words assumptions less suitable for personalization in product search. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical embedding model to learn semantic representations for entities (i.e. words, products, users and queries) from different levels with their associated language data. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) our work is one of the initial studies on personalized product search; (2) our hierarchical embedding model is the first latent space model that jointly learns distributed representations for queries, products and users with a deep neural network; (3) each component of our network is designed as a generative model so that the whole structure is explainable and extendable. Following the methodology of previous studies, we constructed personalized product search benchmarks with Amazon product data. Experiments show that our hierarchical embedding model significantly outperforms existing product search baselines on multiple benchmark datasets.