TACLR: A Scalable and Efficient Retrieval-based Method for Industrial Product Attribute Value Identification

Product Attribute Value Identification (PAVI) involves identifying attribute values from product profiles, a key task for improving product search, recommendations, and business analytics on e-commerce platforms. However, existing PAVI methods face critical challenges, such as inferring implicit values, handling out-of-distribution (OOD) values, and producing normalized outputs. To address these limitations, we introduce Taxonomy-Aware Contrastive Learning Retrieval (TACLR), the first retrieval-based method for PAVI. TACLR formulates PAVI as an information retrieval task by encoding product profiles and candidate values into embeddings and retrieving values based on their similarity to the item embedding. It leverages contrastive training with taxonomy-aware hard negative sampling and employs adaptive inference with dynamic thresholds. TACLR offers three key advantages: (1) it effectively handles implicit and OOD values while producing normalized outputs; (2) it scales to thousands of categories, tens of thousands of attributes, and millions of values; and (3) it supports efficient inference for high-load industrial scenarios. Extensive experiments on proprietary and public datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of TACLR. Moreover, it has been successfully deployed in a real-world e-commerce platform, processing millions of product listings daily while supporting dynamic, large-scale attribute taxonomies.