Advanced natural language processing is used to develop a fully automated catalog

The language group in Rakuten Institute of Technology harnesses the power of AI to provide a fully automated product catalog. The main technology behind this effort is natural language processing. There are several efforts that goes in parallel to realize the vision of a fully automated catalog, namely attribute extraction, category classification, and attribute normalization. Attribute extraction is done to extract key attributes from title and description to make the catalog more structured, searchable, and improve the overall user browsing and purchasing experience in Rakuten’s sites. Attribute normalization is another key initiative that is carried out for critical attributes like brand, size, color, etc. to ensure consistency and improve search results. Category classification is another major initiative that is undertaken to ensure products are rightly categorized into categories and sub-categories so as to improve overall customer experience in browsing the catalog.