Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2020

Abstract

Many E-commerce sites now offer product-specific question answering platforms for users to communicate with each other by posting and answering questions during online shopping. However, the multiple answers provided by ordinary users usually vary diversely in their qualities and thus need to be appropriately ranked for each question to improve user satisfaction. It can be observed that product reviews usually provide useful information for a given question, and thus can assist the ranking process. In this paper, we investigate the answer ranking problem for product-related questions, with the relevant reviews treated as auxiliary information that can be exploited for facilitating the ranking. We propose an answer ranking model named MUSE which carefully models multiple semantic relations among the question, answers, and relevant reviews. Specifically, MUSE constructs a multi-semantic relation graph with the question, each answer, and each review snippet as nodes. Then a customized graph convolutional neural network is designed for explicitly modeling the semantic relevance between the question and answers, the content consistency among answers, and the textual entailment between answers and reviews. Extensive experiments on real-world E-commerce datasets across three product categories show that our proposed model achieves superior performance on the concerned answer ranking task.

Keywords

Auxiliary information, Content consistency, Product categories, Question Answering, Semantic relations, Semantic relevance, Textual entailment, User satisfaction

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Information Security

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering; Information Systems and Management

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

Proceedings of the 43rd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Virtual, Online, 2020 Jul 25-30

First Page

569

Last Page

578

ISBN

9781450380164

Identifier

10.1145/3397271.3401166

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3397271.3401166

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