Product compatibility and their functionality are of utmost importance to customers when they purchase products, and to sellers and manufacturers when they sell products. Due to the huge number of products available online, it is infeasible to enumerate and test the compatibility and functionality of every product. In this paper, we address two closely related problems: product compatibility analysis and function satisfiability analysis, where the second problem is a generalization of the first problem (e.g., whether a product works with another product can be considered as a special function). We first identify a novel question and answering corpus that is up-to-date regarding product compatibility and functionality information. To allow automatic discovery product compatibility and functionality, we then propose a deep learning model called Dual Attention Network (DAN). Given a QA pair for a to-be-purchased product, DAN learns to 1) discover complementary products (or functions), and 2) accurately predict the actual compatibility (or satisfiability) of the discovered products (or functions). The challenges addressed by the model include the briefness of QAs, linguistic patterns indicating compatibility, and the appropriate fusion of questions and answers. We conduct experiments to quantitatively and qualitatively show that the identified products and functions have both high coverage and accuracy, compared with a wide spectrum of baselines.
Complementary products are studied in the context of recommender system @cite_29 . @cite_29 , topic models are used to predict substitutes and complements (without compatibility) of a product. But their work takes the outputs of Amazon's recommender system as the ground truths for complements, which can be inaccurate. Instead, we take an information extraction approach similar to the Complementary Entity Recognition (CER) task in @cite_28 @cite_0 . But we perform in a supervised setting on an annotated QA corpus @cite_16 @cite_23 . We further generalize to a more fundamental task: function satisfiability analysis. Although @cite_17 has a preliminary study on product functions, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to study a fully end-to-end model with satisfiability analysis.
@cite_28 @cite_29 @cite_0 @cite_23 @cite_16 @cite_17
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In a modern recommender system, it is important to understand how products relate to each other. For example, while a user is looking for mobile phones, it might make sense to recommend other phones, but once they buy a phone, we might instead want to recommend batteries, cases, or chargers. These two types of recommendations are referred to as substitutes and complements: substitutes are products that can be purchased instead of each other, while complements are products that can be purchased in addition to each other. Here we develop a method to infer networks of substitutable and complementary products. We formulate this as a supervised link prediction task, where we learn the semantics of substitutes and complements from data associated with products. The primary source of data we use is the text of product reviews, though our method also makes use of features such as ratings, specifications, prices, and brands. Methodologically, we build topic models that are trained to automatically discover topics from text that are successful at predicting and explaining such relationships. Experimentally, we evaluate our system on the Amazon product catalog, a large dataset consisting of 9 million products, 237 million links, and 144 million reviews. Product reviews contain a lot of useful information about product features and customer opinions. One important product feature is the complementary entity (products) that may potentially work together with the reviewed product. Knowing complementary entities of the reviewed product is very important because customers want to buy compatible products and avoid incompatible ones. In this paper, we address the problem of Complementary Entity Recognition (CER). Since no existing method can solve this problem, we first propose a novel unsupervised method to utilize syntactic dependency paths to recognize complementary entities. Then we expand category-level domain knowledge about complementary entities using only a few general seed verbs on a large amount of unlabeled reviews. The domain knowledge helps the unsupervised method to adapt to different products and greatly improves the precision of the CER task. The advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require any labeled data for training. We conducted experiments on 7 popular products with about 1200 reviews in total to demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective. Complementary item recommendation finds products that go well with one another (e.g., a camera and a specific lens). While complementary items are ubiquitous, the dimensions by which items go together can vary by both product and category, making it difficult to detect complementary items at scale. Moreover, in practice, user preferences for complementary items can be complex combinations of item quality and evidence of complementarity. Hence, we propose a new neural complementary recommender E ncore that can jointly learn complementary item relationships and user preferences. Specifically, E ncore (i) effectively combines and balances both stylistic and functional evidence of complementary items across item categories; (ii) naturally models item latent quality for complementary items through Bayesian inference of customer ratings; and (iii) builds a novel neural network model to learn the complex (non-linear) relationships between items for flexible and scalable complementary product recommendations. Through experiments over large Amazon datasets, we find that E ncore effectively learns complementary item relationships, leading to an improvement in accuracy of 15.5 on average versus the next-best alternative. In personalized recommendation, candidate generation plays an infrastructural role by retrieving candidates out of billions of items. During this process, substitutes and complements constitute two main classes of retrieved candidates: substitutable products are interchangeable, whereas complementary products might be purchased together by users. Discriminating substitutable and complementary products is playing an increasingly important role in e-commerce portals by affecting the performance of candidate generation, e.g., when a user has browsed a t-shirt, it is reasonable to retrieve similar t-shirts, i.e., substitutes; whereas if the user has already purchased one, it would be better to retrieve trousers, hats or shoes, as complements of t-shirts. In this paper, we propose a path-constrained framework (PMSC) for discriminating substitutes and complements. Specifically, for each product, we first learn its embedding representations in a general semantic space. Thereafter, we project the embedding vectors into two separate spaces via a novel mapping function. In the end, we incorporate each embedding with path-constraints to further boost the discriminative ability of the model. Extensive experiments conducted on two e-commerce datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method.