2022.emnlp-industry.9@ACL

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#1 Ask-and-Verify: Span Candidate Generation and Verification for Attribute Value Extraction [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi2]

Authors: Yifan Ding ; Yan Liang ; Nasser Zalmout ; Xian Li ; Christan Grant ; Tim Weninger

The product attribute value extraction (AVE) task aims to capture key factual information from product profiles, and is useful for several downstream applications in e-Commerce platforms. Previous contributions usually formulate this task using sequence labeling or reading comprehension architectures. However, sequence labeling models tend to be conservative in their predictions resulting in a high false negative rate. Existing reading comprehension formulations, on the other hand, can over-generate attribute values which hinders precision. In the present work we address these limitations with a new end-to-end pipeline framework called Ask-and-Verify. Given a product and an attribute query, the Ask step detects the top-K span candidates (i.e. possible attribute values) from the product profiles, then the Verify step filters out false positive candidates. We evaluate Ask-and-Verify model on Amazon’s product pages and AliExpress public dataset, and present a comparative analysis as well as a detailed ablation study. Despite its simplicity, we show that Ask-and-Verify outperforms recent state-of-the-art models by up to 3.1% F1 absolute improvement points, while also scaling to thousands of attributes.