Sep 20, 2026, cs.IRJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Girish A. Koushik, Swapnil Bhosale, Samarth Agrawal, Hadeel Sadany+3
Computer Science, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom · People-Centred AI, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom · eBay USA+2
E-commerce search requires distinguishing products that are merely related to a query from those that directly satisfy the user's shopping intent. We augment query-product pairs with structured LLM-generated query and product attributes and human-validated relevance, explanations, and centrality judgments, and evaluate these signals using a simple dual-encoder retriever and MLP re-ranker. On an augmented subset of ESCI, a human-feature oracle reaches
0.9382 nDCG@10, while a human-free trained
Q+P configuration reaches
0.9258. Synthetic approximations of the human signals reach
0.9150 overall but provide substantial gains for difficult, low-performing queries. Ablations show that most of the oracle improvement comes from post-edited explanations and annotator comments rather than the scalar centrality feature, suggesting that LLMs are most useful for exposing and approximating structured semantic supervision rather than replacing human judgment directly.