Customers rely on specific product attributes to compare products and make purchasing decisions, but e-commerce catalogs are messy and unstructured, making it difficult to identify which attributes matter most and extract them at scale. Standard Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) systems treat all attributes equally, producing large, inconsistent attribute sets that do not reflect the factors consumers use to differentiate products. We introduce a two-stage LLM pipeline that first discovers a compact, ranked schema of purchase-discriminative attributes for each product category, then extracts their values from catalog text using a fine-tuned compact LLM (Qwen3-4B) with Hyper-Parallel Decoding (HPD). This pipeline achieves 85% extraction accuracy, on par with the foundational LLM it was distilled from, while reducing inference costs by 92% over foundational LLMs, enabling production-scale use for product discovery and catalog enrichment. The resulting category-level structured representations effectively constitute automatically constructed product knowledge bases, providing consistent, comparable attributes across varied product categories that can ground downstream knowledge-intensive applications.
Product attribute extraction in e-commerce is bottlenecked by ontologies that are inconsistent, incomplete, and costly to maintain. We present AutoPKG, a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) framework that automatically constructs a Product-attribute Knowledge Graph (PKG) from multimodal product content. AutoPKG induces product types and type-specific attribute keys on demand, extracts attribute values from text and images, and consolidates updates through a centralized decision agent that maintains a globally consistent canonical graph. We also propose an evaluation protocol for dynamic PKGs that measures type and key validity, consolidation quality, and edge-level accuracy for value assertions after canonicalization. On a large real-world marketplace catalog dataset from Lazada (Alibaba), AutoPKG achieves up to 0.953 Weighted Knowledge Efficiency (WKE) for product types, 0.724 WKE for attribute keys, and 0.531 edge-level F1 for multimodal value extraction. Across three public benchmarks, our method improves edge-level exact-match F1 by 0.152 and yields a precision gain of 0.208 on the attribute extraction application. Online A/B tests show that AutoPKG-derived attributes increase Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) in Badge by 3.81 percent, in Search by 5.32 percent, and in Recommendation by 7.89 percent, supporting the practical value of AutoPKG in production.
Pollawat Hongwimol, Haoning Shang, Chutong Wang +6
Entity search, i.e., finding the most similar entities to a query entity, faces unique challenges in e-commerce, where product similarity varies across categories and contexts. Traditional embedding-based approaches often struggle to capture nuanced context-specific attribute relevance. In this paper, we present a two-stage approach combining Large Language Model (LLM)-driven attribute graph construction with graph-aware LLM ranking. In the offline stage, we extract structured product attributes from unstructured text, and construct a reusable attribute graph with category-aware schemas. In the online stage, we rank retrieved candidates by reasoning over this structured representation rather than raw text, reducing per-product token usage by 57% while improving ranking precision. Experiments show that our approach outperforms multiple baselines under zero-shot scenarios, achieving a over 5% improvement in average precision without requiring training data, generalizes robustly across diverse product categories, and shows immense potential for real-world deployment.
E-commerce platforms in emerging markets often operate with underdeveloped product catalogs that contain only category taxonomies but lack structured attribute schemas. This absence of fine-grained product attributes limits search capabilities -- preventing faceted filtering, degrading query understanding, and weakening semantic representations used by search systems. We present BEATS, a human-in-the-loop LLM framework for bootstrapping product attribute taxonomies entirely from scratch. Our approach extends a multi-stage LLM generation pipeline with two critical production stages: (1) proactive quality checking by model developers to filter erroneous outputs, and (2) human annotation by domain-expert local staff to validate generated attributes. The framework operates iteratively -- prompts at each generation stage are refined based on quality check observations and annotator feedback across successive rounds, progressively improving attribute quality. Once the attribute taxonomy is established, we employ LLMs to perform structured attribute tagging on individual product items, enriching their contextual representations. The enriched catalog directly benefits multiple components of the search system: enabling granular attribute-based filtering, providing structured features for ranking models, and improving semantic representations for dense retrieval. We validate the generated taxonomy by training dense retrieval models on attribute-enriched product data, demonstrating consistent improvements over baselines using original catalog information. Our system has been deployed at Rakuten Taiwan, enriching 9 major categories spanning 2,694 sub-categories with 67,277 generated attributes, and over 5.4 million products have been tagged with the generated attributes, with plans to enrich the entire product catalog.