Query Brand Entity Linking in E-Commerce Search

Associating user search queries with the correct brand entity is critical for e-commerce product retrieval, yet remains challenging due to the brevity of queries (three to four words on average), their lack of grammatical structure, and a catalog of hundreds of thousands of distinct brands. We formulate this as a brand entity linking task and develop two complementary solutions deployed at scale: (1) a cascaded pipeline that first detects brand mentions via sequence labeling and then disambiguates against a brand knowledge base, and (2) a single-stage approach that frames linking as extreme multiclass classification, directly mapping queries to brand identifiers. Through extensive multilingual evaluation (11 languages) and a controlled online experiment, we demonstrate that the proposed methods substantially improve brand recall while maintaining high precision, leading to measurable gains in customer engagement.