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How Do Users Revise Zero-Hit Product Search Queries?

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12657))

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Abstract

A product search on an e-commerce site can return zero hits for several reasons. One major reason is that a user’s query may not be appropriately expressed for locating existing products. To enable successful product purchase, an ideal e-commerce site should automatically revise the user query to avoid zero hits. We investigate what kinds of query revision strategies turn a zero-hit query into a successful query, by analyzing data from a major Japanese e-commerce site. Our analysis shows that about 99% of zero-hit queries can be turned into successful queries that lead to product purchase by term dropping (27%), term replacement (29%), rephrasing (17%), and typo correction (26%). The results suggest that an automatic rewriter for avoiding zero-hit product queries may be able to achieve satisfactory coverage and accuracy by focusing on the above four revision strategies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/a-global-view-of-how-consumer-behavior-is-changing-amid-covid-19.

  2. 2.

    http://taku910.github.io/mecab/.

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Correspondence to Yuki Amemiya .

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Amemiya, Y., Manabe, T., Fujita, S., Sakai, T. (2021). How Do Users Revise Zero-Hit Product Search Queries?. In: Hiemstra, D., Moens, MF., Mothe, J., Perego, R., Potthast, M., Sebastiani, F. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12657. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72240-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72240-1_14

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72239-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72240-1

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