Unlocking markets: A multilingual benchmark to cross-market question answering

• Main Authors: YUAN, Yifei, DENG, Yang, SOGAARD, Anders, ALLIANNEJADI, Mohammad
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Large-scale dataset; E-commerce platforms; Large Language Models (LLMs); Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/9539; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/10539/viewcontent/21f2d042_e572_43ec_9332_665f06331a15.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Users post numerous product-related questions on e-commerce platforms, affecting their purchase decisions. Product-related question answering (PQA) entails utilizing product-related resources to provide precise responses to users. Wepropose a novel task of Multilingual Crossmarket Product-based Question Answering (MCPQA) and define the task as providing answers to product-related questions in a main marketplace by utilizing information from another resource-rich auxiliary marketplace in a multilingual context. We introduce a largescale dataset comprising over 7 million questions from 17 marketplaces across 11 languages. We then perform automatic translation on the Electronics category of our dataset, naming it as McMarket. We focus on two subtasks: review-based answer generation and productrelated question ranking. For each subtask, we label a subset of McMarket using an LLM and further evaluate the quality of the annotations via human assessment. We then conduct experiments to benchmark our dataset, using models ranging from traditional lexical models to LLMsin both single-market and cross-market scenarios across McMarket and the corresponding LLM subset. Results show that incorporating cross-market information significantly enhances performance in both tasks.