# Heterogeneous Network Embedding for Deep Semantic Relevance Match in E-commerce Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04850/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03578/) (2015)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09223/) (2019)
- [Enhanced LSTM for Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06038/) (2016)
- [A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08611/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Neural Ad-hoc Ranking with Kernel Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06613/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Matching Natural Language Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03244/) (2015)
- [Learning to Match Using Local and Distributed Representations of Text for Web Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08136/) (2016)
- [Text Matching as Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06359/) (2016)
- [Semantic Product Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00937/) (2019)
- [A Deep Architecture for Semantic Matching with Multiple Positional Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08277/) (2015)
- [MatchZoo: A Toolkit for Deep Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07270/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Result relevance prediction is an essential task of e-commerce search engines to boost the utility of search engines and ensure smooth user experience. The last few years eyewitnessed a flurry of research on the use of Transformer-style models and deep text-match models to improve relevance. However, these two types of models ignored the inherent bipartite network structures that are ubiquitous in e-commerce search logs, making these models ineffective. We propose in this paper a novel Second-order Relevance, which is fundamentally different from the previous First-order Relevance, to improve result relevance prediction. We design, for the first time, an end-to-end First-and-Second-order Relevance prediction model for e-commerce item relevance. The model is augmented by the neighborhood structures of bipartite networks that are built using the information of user behavioral feedback, including clicks and purchases. To ensure that edges accurately encode relevance information, we introduce external knowledge generated from BERT to refine the network of user behaviors. This allows the new model to integrate information from neighboring items and queries, which are highly relevant to the focus query-item pair under consideration. Results of offline experiments showed that the new model significantly improved the prediction accuracy in terms of human relevance judgment. An ablation study showed that the First-and-Second-order model gained a 4.3% average gain over the First-order model. Results of an online A/B test revealed that the new model derived more commercial benefits compared to the base model.