NAM: A Normalization Attention Model for Personalized Product Search In Fliggy

Personalized product search provides significant benefits to e-commerce platforms by extracting more accurate user preferences from historical behaviors. Previous studies largely focused on the user factors when personalizing the search query, while ignoring the item perspective, which leads to the following two challenges that we summarize in this paper: First, previous approaches relying only on co-occurrence frequency tend to overestimate the conversion rates for popular items and underestimate those for long-tail items, resulting in inaccurate item similarities; Second, user purchasing propensity is highly heterogeneous according to the popularity of the target item: it is less correlated with the user's historical behavior for a popular item and more correlated for a long-tail item. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose NAM, a Normalization Attention Model, which optimizes ''when to personalize'' by utilizing Inverse Item Frequency (IIF) and employing a gating mechanism, as well as optimizes ''how to personalize'' by normalizing the attention mechanism from a global perspective. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed NAM model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models. Furthermore, we conducted an online A/B test at Fliggy, and obtained a significant improvement of 0.8% over the latest production system in conversion rate.

M3PT: A Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging

POI tagging aims to annotate a point of interest (POI) with some informative tags, which facilitates many services related to POIs, including search, recommendation, and so on. Most of the existing solutions neglect the significance of POI images and seldom fuse the textual and visual features of POIs, resulting in suboptimal tagging performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging, namely M3PT, which achieves enhanced POI tagging through fusing the target POI's textual and visual features, and the precise matching between the multi-modal representations. Specifically, we first devise a domain-adaptive image encoder (DIE) to obtain the image embeddings aligned to their gold tags' semantics. Then, in M3PT's text-image fusion module (TIF), the textual and visual representations are fully fused into the POIs' content embeddings for the subsequent matching. In addition, we adopt a contrastive learning strategy to further bridge the gap between the representations of different modalities. To evaluate the tagging models' performance, we have constructed two high-quality POI tagging datasets from the real-world business scenario of Ali Fliggy. Upon the datasets, we conducted the extensive experiments to demonstrate our model's advantage over the baselines of uni-modality and multi-modality, and verify the effectiveness of important components in M3PT, including DIE, TIF and the contrastive learning strategy.

QUERT: Continual Pre-training of Language Model for Query Understanding in Travel Domain Search

In light of the success of the pre-trained language models (PLMs), continual pre-training of generic PLMs has been the paradigm of domain adaption. In this paper, we propose QUERT, A Continual Pre-trained Language Model for QUERy Understanding in Travel Domain Search. QUERT is jointly trained on four tailored pre-training tasks to the characteristics of query in travel domain search: Geography-aware Mask Prediction, Geohash Code Prediction, User Click Behavior Learning, and Phrase and Token Order Prediction. Performance improvement of downstream tasks and ablation experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed pre-training tasks. To be specific, the average performance of downstream tasks increases by 2.02% and 30.93% in supervised and unsupervised settings, respectively. To check on the improvement of QUERT to online business, we deploy QUERT and perform A/B testing on Fliggy APP. The feedback results show that QUERT increases the Unique Click-Through Rate and Page Click-Through Rate by 0.89% and 1.03% when applying QUERT as the encoder. Our code and downstream task data will be released for future research.

Modeling Price Elasticity for Occupancy Prediction in Hotel Dynamic Pricing

Demand estimation plays an important role in dynamic pricing where the optimal price can be obtained via maximizing the revenue based on the demand curve. In online hotel booking platform, the demand or occupancy of rooms varies across room-types and changes over time, and thus it is challenging to get an accurate occupancy estimate. In this paper, we propose a novel hotel demand function that explicitly models the price elasticity of demand for occupancy prediction, and design a price elasticity prediction model to learn the dynamic price elasticity coefficient from a variety of affecting factors. Our model is composed of carefully designed elasticity learning modules to alleviate the endogeneity problem, and trained in a multi-task framework to tackle the data sparseness. We conduct comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets and validate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art baselines for both occupancy prediction and dynamic pricing.