# Supervised Transfer Learning for Product Information Question Answering

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that transfer learning from large community question answering datasets significantly improves product question answering accuracy on e-commerce sites, with practical application in mobile shopping assistants.

## Contribution

The study introduces a transfer learning approach that leverages Amazon QA data to enhance product question answering systems for other e-commerce platforms.

## Key findings

- Approximately 10% accuracy improvement with transfer learning.
- Transfer learning is effective even with limited target data.
- Model integration improves mobile shopping experience.

## Abstract

Popular e-commerce websites such as Amazon offer community question answering systems for users to pose product related questions and experienced customers may provide answers voluntarily. In this paper, we show that the large volume of existing community question answering data can be beneficial when building a system for answering questions related to product facts and specifications. Our experimental results demonstrate that the performance of a model for answering questions related to products listed in the Home Depot website can be improved by a large margin via a simple transfer learning technique from an existing large-scale Amazon community question answering dataset. Transfer learning can result in an increase of about 10% in accuracy in the experimental setting where we restrict the size of the data of the target task used for training. As an application of this work, we integrate the best performing model trained in this work into a mobile-based shopping assistant and show its usefulness.