Query Understanding is a semantic search method that can classify tokens in a customer's search query to entities such as Product, Brand, etc. This method can overcome the limitations of bag-of-words methods but requires an ontology. We show that current ontologies are not optimized for search and propose a simplified ontology framework designed specifically for e-commerce search and retrieval. We also present three methods for automatically extracting product classes for the proposed ontology and compare their performance relative to each other.
@article{arxiv.1807.02039,
title = {Towards a simplified ontology for better e-commerce search},
author = {Aliasgar Kutiyanawala and Prateek Verma and Zheng and Yan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.02039},
year = {2018}
}