Multi-Modal Attribute Extraction for E-Commerce

To improve users' experience as they navigate the myriad of options offered by online marketplaces, it is essential to have well-organized product catalogs. One key ingredient to that is the availability of product attributes such as color or material. However, on some marketplaces such as Rakuten-Ichiba, which we focus on, attribute information is often incomplete or even missing. One promising solution to this problem is to rely on deep models pre-trained on large corpora to predict attributes from unstructured data, such as product descriptive texts and images (referred to as modalities in this paper). However, we find that achieving satisfactory performance with this approach is not straightforward but rather the result of several refinements, which we discuss in this paper. We provide a detailed description of our approach to attribute extraction, from investigating strong single-modality methods, to building a solid multimodal model combining textual and visual information. One key component of our multimodal architecture is a novel approach to seamlessly combine modalities, which is inspired by our single-modality investigations. In practice, we notice that this new modality-merging method may suffer from a modality collapse issue, i.e., it neglects one modality. Hence, we further propose a mitigation to this problem based on a principled regularization scheme. Experiments on Rakuten-Ichiba data provide empirical evidence for the benefits of our approach, which has been also successfully deployed to Rakuten-Ichiba. We also report results on publicly available datasets showing that our model is competitive compared to several recent multimodal and unimodal baselines.