Information Discovery in E-commerce - Ren Zhaochun

Electronic commerce, or e-commerce, is the online buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data. E-commerce platforms come in many kinds, with global players such as Amazon, Airbnb, Alibaba, Booking.com, eBay, JD.com and platforms targeting specific geographic regions such as Bol.com and Flipkart.com. Information retrieval has a natural role to play in e-commerce, especially in connecting people to goods and services. Information discovery in e-commerce concerns different types of search (e.g., exploratory search vs. lookup tasks), recommender systems, and natural language processing in e-commerce portals. The rise in popularity of e-commerce sites has made research on information discovery in e-commerce an increasingly active research area. This is witnessed by an increase in publications and dedicated workshops in this space.

In this monograph, an overview is given of the fundamental infrastructure, algorithms, and technical solutions for information discovery in e-commerce. The topics covered include user behavior and profiling, search, recommendation, and language technology in e-commerce.

Methods for information discovery in e-commerce largely focus on improving the effectiveness of e-commerce search and recommender systems, on enriching and using knowledge graphs to support e-commerce, and on developing innovative question answering and bot-based solutions that help to connect people to goods and services. These topics are covered in this book.

This monograph is intended for everyone who works on the Information Discovery and Retrieval aspects within e-commerce.