A multi-representation re-ranking model for Personalized Product Search

In recent years, a multitude of e-commerce websites arose. Product Search is a fundamental part of these websites, which is often managed as a traditional retrieval task. However, Product Search has the ultimate goal of satisfying specific and personal user needs, leading users to find and purchase what they are looking for, based on their preferences. To maximize users’ satisfaction, Product Search should be treated as a personalized task. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a simple yet effective personalized results re-ranking approach based on the fusion of the relevance score computed by a well-known ranking model, namely BM25, with the scores deriving from multiple user/item representations. Our main contributions are: (1) we propose a score fusion-based approach for personalized re-ranking that leverages multiple user/item representations, (2) our approach accounts for both content-based features and collaborative information (i.e. features extracted from the user–item interactions graph), (3) the proposed approach is fast and scalable, can be easily added on top of any search engine and it can be extended to include additional features. The performed comparative evaluations show that our model can significantly increase the retrieval effectiveness of the underlying retrieval model and, in the great majority of cases, outperforms modern Neural Network-based personalized retrieval models for Product Search.