Publications
CONFERENCE (INTERNATIONAL) How Do Users Revise Zero-Hit Product Search Queries?
Yuki Amemiya (Waseda University), Tomohiro Manabe, Sumio Fujita, Tetsuya Sakai (Waseda University)
The 43rd edition of the annual BCS-IRSG European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021)
March 29, 2021
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.
Paper :
How Do Users Revise Zero-Hit Product Search Queries?
(external link)