Learning-To-Embed: Adopting Transformer based models for E-commerce Products Representation Learning

Learning low-dimensional representation for large number of products present in an e-commerce catalogue plays a vital role as they are helpful in tasks like product ranking, product recommendation, finding similar products, modelling user-behaviour etc. Recently, a lot of tasks in the NLP field are getting tackled using the Transformer based models and these deep models are widely applicable in the industries setting to solve various problems. With this motivation, we apply transformer based model for learning contextual representation of products in an e-commerce setting. In this work, we propose a novel approach of pre-training transformer based model on a users generated sessions dataset obtained from a large fashion e-commerce platform to obtain latent product representation. Once pre-trained, we show that the low-dimension representation of the products can be obtained given the product attributes information as a textual sentence. We mainly pre-train BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT and XLNET variants of transformer model and show a quantitative analysis of the products representation obtained from these models with respect to Next Product Recommendation(NPR) and Content Ranking(CR) tasks. For both the tasks, we collect an evaluation data from the fashion e-commerce platform and observe that XLNET model outperform other variants with a MRR of 0.5 for NPR and NDCG of 0.634 for CR. XLNET model also outperforms the Word2Vec based non-transformer baseline on both the downstream tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and novel work for pre-training transformer based models using users generated sessions data containing products that are represented with rich attributes information for adoption in e-commerce setting. These models can be further fine-tuned in order to solve various downstream tasks in e-commerce, thereby eliminating the need to train a model from scratch.