In plain words: Walmart's search now combines old-fashioned keyword matching with a system that compares the meaning of a query to products, so rare, specific searches find better candidates. It made results more relevant in tests and live shopping without slowing responses much.
Abstract
In product search, the retrieval of candidate products before re-ranking is more critical and challenging than other search like web search, especially for tail queries, which have a complex and specific search intent. In this paper, we present a hybrid system for e-commerce search deployed at Walmart that combines traditional inverted index and embedding-based neural retrieval to better answer user tail queries. Our system significantly improved the relevance of the search engine, measured by both offline and online evaluations. The improvements were achieved through a combination of different approaches. We present a new technique to train the neural model at scale. and describe how the system was deployed in production with little impact on response time. We highlight multiple learnings and practical tricks that were used in the deployment of this system.
Alessandro Magnani, Feng Liu, Suthee Chaidaroon, Sachin Yadav, Praveen Reddy Suram, Ajit Puthenputhussery, Sijie Chen, Min Xie, Anirudh Kashi, Tony Lee, Ciya Liao
arXiv:2412.04637 · cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Dec 5, 2024
abstract · pdf · 9 page, 2 figures, 10 tables, KDD 2022