Item Matching using Text Description and Similarity Search

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for item matching based solely on short text descriptions, achieving up to 55% accuracy within an 8-week development timeframe.

Contribution

The study demonstrates a practical approach to item matching using text similarity search with limited data and time, resulting in a successful MVP.

Findings

Achieved up to 55% match accuracy

Developed a viable MVP within 8 weeks

Validated the effectiveness of text-based item matching

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the problem of item matching using only the description. Those specific items not only lack a unique code but also contain short text descriptions, making the item matching process difficult. Our goal is to compare products using only the description provided by the purchase process. Therefore, evaluating other characteristics and differences can uncover possible flaws during the acquiring phase. However, the text of the items that we were working on was very small, with numbers due to the nature of the products and we have a limited amount of time to develop the solution which was 8 weeks. As result, we showed that working using a well-oriented methodology we were able to deliver a successful MVP and achieve the results expected with up to 55% match.