AliMe KG: Domain Knowledge Graph Construction and Application in E-commerce

TL;DR

This paper introduces AliMe KG, a domain knowledge graph for E-commerce that enhances pre-sales customer service by understanding user needs, answering questions, and generating explanations, demonstrating its practical industrial value.

Contribution

The paper presents a systematic method for constructing a domain knowledge graph from free text and demonstrates its application in multiple E-commerce scenarios.

Findings

Effective knowledge graph construction from free text

Improved customer service applications in E-commerce

Substantial industrial value demonstrated

Abstract

Pre-sales customer service is of importance to E-commerce platforms as it contributes to optimizing customers' buying process. To better serve users, we propose AliMe KG, a domain knowledge graph in E-commerce that captures user problems, points of interests (POI), item information and relations thereof. It helps to understand user needs, answer pre-sales questions and generate explanation texts. We applied AliMe KG to several online business scenarios such as shopping guide, question answering over properties and recommendation reason generation, and gained positive results. In the paper, we systematically introduce how we construct domain knowledge graph from free text, and demonstrate its business value with several applications. Our experience shows that mining structured knowledge from free text in vertical domain is practicable, and can be of substantial value in industrial settings.