ECLASS-Augmented Semantic Product Search for Electronic Components

TL;DR

This paper evaluates LLM-assisted dense retrieval for industrial electronic component search, showing that integrating ECLASS hierarchical semantics significantly improves retrieval effectiveness over traditional methods.

Contribution

It systematically assesses the combination of dense retrieval and ECLASS semantic augmentation, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in industrial product search.

Findings

Dense retrieval with re-ranking outperforms lexical methods and web-search baselines.

Augmenting representations with ECLASS semantics improves retrieval accuracy.

Achieves Hit_Rate@5 of 94.3%, surpassing BM25 and foundation models.

Abstract

Efficient semantic access to industrial product data is a key enabler for factory automation and emerging LLM-based agent workflows, where both human engineers and autonomous agents must identify suitable components from highly structured catalogs. However, the vocabulary mismatch between natural-language queries and attribute-centric product descriptions limits the effectiveness of traditional retrieval approaches, e.g., BM25. In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of LLM-assisted dense retrieval for semantic product search on industrial electronic components, and investigate the integration of hierarchical semantics from the ECLASS standard into embedding-based retrieval. Our results show that dense retrieval combined with re-ranking substantially outperforms classical lexical methods and foundation model web-search baselines. In particular, the proposed approach achieves a Hit_Rate@5 of 94.3 %, compared to 31.4 % for BM25 on expert queries, while also exceeding foundation model baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, augmenting product representations with ECLASS semantics yields consistent performance gains across configurations, demonstrating that standardized hierarchical metadata provides a crucial semantic bridge between user intent and sparse product descriptions.