# Graph-based Multilingual Product Retrieval in E-commerce Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02978 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02978/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01502/) (2019)
- [Poly-encoders: Transformer Architectures and Pre-training Strategies for Fast and Accurate Multi-sentence Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01969/) (2019)
- [Embedding-based Retrieval in Facebook Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11632/) (2020)
- [Pre-training Tasks for Embedding-based Large-scale Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03932/) (2020)
- [Named Entity Recognition as Dependency Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07150/) (2020)
- [A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08611/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Matching Natural Language Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03244/) (2015)
- [Text Matching as Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06359/) (2016)
- [Deep Sentence Embedding Using Long Short-Term Memory Networks: Analysis and Application to Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.06922/) (2015)
- [Learning Joint Multilingual Sentence Representations with Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04154/) (2017)
- [Semantic Product Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00937/) (2019)
- [Cross-lingual Information Retrieval with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13005/) (2020)
- [Neural IR Meets Graph Embedding: A Ranking Model for Product Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08286/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ItemSage: Learning Product Embeddings for Shopping Recommendations at Pinterest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11728/) (2022)
- [LLaMA-E: Empowering E-commerce Authoring with Object-Interleaved Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04913/) (2023)
- [A Transformer-Based Substitute Recommendation Model Incorporating Weakly Supervised Customer Behavior Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02533/) (2022)
- [Machine Translation Impact in E-commerce Multilingual Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00119/) (2023)
- [Unified Embedding Based Personalized Retrieval in Etsy Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04833/) (2023)
- [PEFA: Parameter-Free Adapters for Large-scale Embedding-based Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02429/) (2023)
- [EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06839/) (2024)
- [Breaking the Autoregressive Chain: Hyper-Parallel Decoding for Efficient LLM-Based Attribute Value Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26209/) (2026)
- [ZhichunRoad at Amazon KDD Cup 2022: MultiTask Pre-Training for E-Commerce Product Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13455/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Nowadays, with many e-commerce platforms conducting global business, e-commerce search systems are required to handle product retrieval under multilingual scenarios. Moreover, comparing with maintaining per-country specific e-commerce search systems, having a universal system across countries can further reduce the operational and computational costs, and facilitate business expansion to new countries. In this paper, we introduce a universal end-to-end multilingual retrieval system, and discuss our learnings and technical details when training and deploying the system to serve billion-scale product retrieval for e-commerce search. In particular, we propose a multilingual graph attention based retrieval network by leveraging recent advances in transformer-based multilingual language models and graph neural network architectures to capture the interactions between search queries and items in e-commerce search. Offline experiments on five countries data show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by 35% recall and 25% mAP on average. Moreover, the proposed model shows significant increase of conversion/revenue in online A/B experiments and has been deployed in production for multiple countries.