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Recent Activities for the Rakuten Global e-commerce

Atividades de Pesquisa da Rakuten para o e-commerce Global

Rakuten Institute of Technology, New York

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Rakuten Institute of Technology

Turning emerging and growing new technology seedsinto new business/service opportunities

to enrich the internet life (& real life) all over the world

Mission

The Next Reality- New reality through emerging technologies -

Concept Tokyo & NY

Strategic R&D organization for Rakuten group

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Our goal

How was the carrot you got

yesterday?Today this fresh lettuce is good Recommendation

You will take a

vacation?

The travel agent over there gives

good serviceAffiliation

You are on diet, but like sweet food?

This sweet tomato is good for your health

Personalization

Old-fashioned vegetable shop

owner

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Our goal

You want to know the

vegetable in this photo…

It is an artichoke.

Image recognition

You can boil it and eat it with

mayonnaiseWorld knowledge

Recently, it is very popular among young

people

Opinion mining

Old-fashioned vegetable shop

owner

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Create happy shopping experiences

Hints from a legendary & successful owner at a market

Understand language

Master his products

Understand the customers

World Knowledge

Recognize image, video

Remember for the future

Manipulate knowledge

Think, inference, analysis

Situation adaptation

Friendly service

NLP

Multi-media

Data

Semantic

Data

I/F

AI

Infrastructure

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Research Topics

1. Rakuten Hub Category

2. Category Correction

3. Attribute Extraction

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Research Topics

1. Rakuten Hub Category

2. Category Correction

3. Attribute Extraction

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Different Category Structures of Rakuten Group Companies

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Hub and Spoke Model

HUB

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Global vs. Local

Problem: Culture/Market dependencyWe need one uniform DB structure = Global Catalog

Organize globally Adapt Locally

Sports Equipment

PelotaBaseball

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Overview

attribute value

Product information by Attributes and

values

Product types

Product category for display is decided by “product types” and a set of attribute values

Mapping

R-HC Local Hierarchy

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Definition of Global Category

135 top categoriesCulture/country independent

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Definition of Attribute (bag)

Set of attributes for each category

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Tool to be provided

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Research Topics

1. Rakuten Hub Category

2. Category Correction

3. Attribute Extraction

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2. Category Correction

Muffler

SakeNOISE!

Muffler

Muffler

Users are annoyed, Merchants are in trouble → Detecting the misplaced products → Reassigning them into the right genres

Many products are assigned into a wrong category

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Bottle720mlJapan

DeliciousTengumailight

Japanese SakeJapanese Sake

TengumaiNote:“Tengumai” is a famous Japanese sake (rice wine)

The words, which are assigned into only one category automatically

dictionary

Definitive Category Words (DCW)

Modified TF/IDF strategies

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Actual Contributions

0

10

20

30

40

Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov.

GMS

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10

20

30

40

Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov.

GMS

(1) 2 big merchants2 million products (2011/9)

FIX Merchant A FIX2011 2011

(3) Expanding to more categories

(2) 2 categories, which include 1,000 merchants1 million products (2011/11)

Merchant B

→ Contributed to GMS

5 million products (2012/10)

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Research Topics

1. Rakuten Hub Category

2. Category Correction

3. Attribute Extraction

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3. Automatic Attribute Extraction

Unsupervised Extraction of Attribute and value from product description

Attribute Value

Color Red

County Chile

Grape Cabernet franc,Merlot,

Vintage 2009

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Product information is embedded in texts

38% 62%

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Synonym Detection

• Attribute names that share a popular value and don’t appear in the same table are synonym

RegionFrance, German, Italy …

Alcohol

District

Temperaturefor drinking

15 degree, 8 degree …

Synonym

Not Synonym

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KB for wine category

Grape Type

Volume Region Winery Taste

Chardonnay 750ML France Farnese Dry

Chardonnay100%

720ML Italy Mas de Monistrol

Full body

Merlot 375ML Spain Leroy Medium body

Riesling 500ML Chile M. Chapoutier Slightly sweet

Syrah 1500ML German Mastroberardino

Sweet

Grenache 360ML Australia Santero Medium dry

Merlot 200ML America Saltarelli Extremely sweet

Tempranillo 3000ML Bordeaux Cavicchioli Medium dry

Sangiovese 1800ML Champagne Fontodi Red Full body

Syrah100% 1000ML Argentina Ca'Rugate Middle sweet

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Our Goal

Technologies for

Happy

Shopping

Experiences

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Our Goal