K-PLUG: Knowledge-injected Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding and Generation in E-Commerce

TL;DR

K-PLUG is a domain-specific pre-trained language model that incorporates e-commerce knowledge to improve understanding and generation tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results in various e-commerce NLP applications.

Contribution

It introduces five knowledge-aware pre-training objectives to inject domain-specific e-commerce knowledge into a transformer-based model for NLP tasks.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art on product knowledge base completion

Outperforms baselines in product summarization

Enhances multi-turn dialogue in e-commerce scenarios

Abstract

Existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-supervised learning for a broad range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, most of them are not explicitly aware of domain-specific knowledge, which is essential for downstream tasks in many domains, such as tasks in e-commerce scenarios. In this paper, we propose K-PLUG, a knowledge-injected pre-trained language model based on the encoder-decoder transformer that can be transferred to both natural language understanding and generation tasks. We verify our method in a diverse range of e-commerce scenarios that require domain-specific knowledge. Specifically, we propose five knowledge-aware self-supervised pre-training objectives to formulate the learning of domain-specific knowledge, including e-commerce domain-specific knowledge-bases, aspects of product entities, categories of product entities, and unique selling propositions of product entities. K-PLUG achieves new state-of-the-art results on a suite of domain-specific NLP tasks, including product knowledge base completion, abstractive product summarization, and multi-turn dialogue, significantly outperforms baselines across the board, which demonstrates that the proposed method effectively learns a diverse set of domain-specific knowledge for both language understanding and generation tasks.