# Search Intelligence: Deep Learning For Dominant Category Prediction

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a supervised deep CNN model for predicting the dominant category of search queries to improve search recall on eBay classifieds, leveraging collaborative click data for labeling.

## Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining collaborative click-based labeling with deep CNN classification for dominant category prediction.

## Key findings

- High classification accuracy achieved
- Outperforms existing machine learning techniques
- Effective use of collaborative click data

## Abstract

Deep Neural Networks, and specifically fully-connected convolutional neural networks are achieving remarkable results across a wide variety of domains. They have been trained to achieve state-of-the-art performance when applied to problems such as speech recognition, image classification, natural language processing and bioinformatics. Most of these deep learning models when applied to classification employ the softmax activation function for prediction and aim to minimize cross-entropy loss. In this paper, we have proposed a supervised model for dominant category prediction to improve search recall across all eBay classifieds platforms. The dominant category label for each query in the last 90 days is first calculated by summing the total number of collaborative clicks among all categories. The category having the highest number of collaborative clicks for the given query will be considered its dominant category. Second, each query is transformed to a numeric vector by mapping each unique word in the query document to a unique integer value; all padded to equal length based on the maximum document length within the pre-defined vocabulary size. A fully-connected deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is then applied for classification. The proposed model achieves very high classification accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art machine learning techniques.