Product Question Answering in E-Commerce: A Survey
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Abstract (arXiv)
Product question answering (PQA), aiming to automatically provide instant responses to customer's questions in E-Commerce platforms, has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Compared with typical QA problems, PQA exhibits unique challenges such as the subjectivity and reliability of user-generated contents in E-commerce platforms. Therefore, various problem settings and novel methods have been proposed to capture these special characteristics. In this paper, we aim to systematically review existing research efforts on PQA. Specifically, we categorize PQA studies into four problem settings in terms of the form of provided answers. We analyze the pros and cons, as well as present existing datasets and evaluation protocols for each setting. We further summarize the most significant challenges that characterize PQA from general QA applications and discuss their corresponding solutions. Finally, we conclude this paper by providing the prospect on several future directions.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 38 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2023.
Builds on
38 of 76 references.
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26 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 8; 2025: 1.
10 papers.
- 2024eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Datacited by 46
- 2024AGILE: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Framework of LLM Agentscited by 45
- 2024IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commercecited by 11
- 2024Question Suggestion for Conversational Shopping Assistants Using Product Metadatacited by 8
- 2024An Empirical Comparison of Generative Approaches for Product Attribute-Value Identificationcited by 7
- 2024BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domaincited by 4
- 2023Answering Subjective Induction Questions on Products by Summarizing Multi-sources Multi-viewpoints Knowledgecited by 0
- 2024Instant Answering in E-Commerce Buyer-Seller Messaging using Message-to-Question Reformulationcited by 0
- 2024Unlocking Markets: A Multilingual Benchmark to Cross-Market Question Answeringcited by 0
- 2025QQSUM: A Novel Task and Model of Quantitative Query-Focused Summarization for Review-based Product Question Answeringcited by 0
- 2025QQSUM: A Novel Task and Model of Quantitative Query-Focused Summarization for Review-based Product Question Answering4 Jun 2025
- 2024BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain30 Sep 2024
- 2024Unlocking Markets: A Multilingual Benchmark to Cross-Market Question Answering24 Sep 2024
- 2024An Empirical Comparison of Generative Approaches for Product Attribute-Value Identification1 Jul 2024
- 2024IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce14 Jun 2024
- 2024AGILE: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Framework of LLM Agents23 May 2024
- 2024Question Suggestion for Conversational Shopping Assistants Using Product Metadata2 May 2024
- 2024eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data13 Feb 2024
- 2024Instant Answering in E-Commerce Buyer-Seller Messaging using Message-to-Question Reformulation18 Jan 2024
- 2023Answering Subjective Induction Questions on Products by Summarizing Multi-sources Multi-viewpoints Knowledge12 Sep 2023