Automatic Generation of Pattern-controlled Product Description in E-commerce

Nowadays, online shoppers have paid more and more attention to detailed product descriptions, since a well-written description is a huge factor in making online sales. However, for a website with billions of product data like Alibaba, the writing efficiency of human copywriters cannot match the growth rate of new products. To address this issue, we propose a novel pointer-generator neural network to generate product description. In particular, coordinate encoders and a pattern-controlled decoder are utilized to improve generation quality with an attention mechanism. The coordinate encoders equipped with a Transformer and a gated convolutional unit is introduced to learn the source input representations. In the decoding phase, a pattern controlled decoder is proposed to control the output description pattern (such as category, length, and style) to ensure the quality of the description. For evaluation, we build a substantial collection of real-world products along with human-written descriptions. An extensive set of experiments with both human annotated data demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method for generation qualities. Finally, an online deployment shows significant benefits of our model in a real online shopping scenario, as measured by the click-through rate.