G2PTL: A Pre-trained Model for Delivery Address and its Applications in Logistics System

Text-based delivery addresses, as the data foundation for logistics systems, contain abundant and crucial location information. How to effectively encode the delivery address is a core task to boost the performance of downstream tasks in the logistics system. Pre-trained Models (PTMs) designed for Natural Language Process (NLP) have emerged as the dominant tools for encoding semantic information in text. Though promising, those NLP-based PTMs fall short of encoding geographic knowledge in the delivery address, which considerably trims down the performance of delivery-related tasks in logistic systems such as Cainiao. To tackle the above problem, we propose a domain-specific pre-trained model, named G2PTL, a Geography-Graph Pre-trained model for delivery address in Logistics field. G2PTL combines the semantic learning capabilities of text pre-training with the geographical-relationship encoding abilities of graph modeling. Specifically, we first utilize real-world logistics delivery data to construct a large-scale heterogeneous graph of delivery addresses, which contains abundant geographic knowledge and delivery information. Then, G2PTL is pre-trained with subgraphs sampled from the heterogeneous graph. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of G2PTL through four downstream tasks in logistics systems on real-world datasets. G2PTL has been deployed in production in Cainiao's logistics system, which significantly improves the performance of delivery-related tasks.