[rakutentechconf2013][c-4_3] our goals and activities at rakuten institute of technology

Our Goals and Activities at Rakuten Institute of TechnologyOctober/26/2013Satoshi SekineRakuten Institute of TechnologyRakuten Inc.

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Our goal

How was the carrot you got

yesterday?

Today this fresh lettuce

is good

Recommendation

You will take a

vacation?The travel agent over there gives

good service

Affiliation

You are on diet, but

like sweet food? This sweet

tomato is good for

your health

Personalization

Old-fashioned

shop owner

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Our goal

You want to know

the vegetable

in this photo…

It is an artichoke.

Image recognition

You can boil it and eat it

with mayonnaise

World knowledge

Recently, it is very popular among young

people

Opinion mining

Old-fashioned

shop owner

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Create happy shopping experiences

Hints from a legendary & successful real market

Understand language

Master his products

Understand the customers

World Knowledge

Recognize image, video

Remember for the future

Manipulate knowledge

Think, inference, analysis

Situation adaptation

Friendly service

NLP

Multi-media

Big Data

Semantic

Big Data

I/F

Artificial Intelligence

Infrastructure

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Research Topics

1. Rakuten Hub Category2. Category Correction3. Surf Shopping

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Research Topics

1. Rakuten Hub Category2. Category Correction3. Surf Shopping

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Different Category Structures of Rakuten Marketplaces

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Hub and Spoke Model

HUB

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Global vs. Local

Problem: Culture/Market dependencyWe need one uniform DB structure = Global Catalog

Organize globally Adapt Locally

Sports Equipment

PelotaBaseball

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Overview

attribute value

Product information by Attributes and values

Product types

Product category for display is decided by “product types” and a set of attribute values

Mapping

R-HC Local Hierarchy

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Definition of Global Category

135 top categoriesCulture/country independent

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Definition of Attribute (bag)

Set of attributes for each category

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Mapping Tool

Specify a category of a marketplace,

and show the corresponding category

of all the Rakuten marketplace

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Research Topics

1. Rakuten Hub Category2. Category Correction3. Surf Shopping

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2. Category Correction

Muffler

SakeNOISE!

Muffler

Muffler

Users are annoyed, Merchants are in trouble → Detecting the misplaced products → Reassigning them into the right genres

Many products are assigned into a wrong category

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Bottle720mlJapan

DeliciousTengumailight

Japanese Sake

TengumaiNote:“Tengumai” is a famous Japanese sake (rice wine)

The words, which are assigned into only one category automatically

dictionary

Definitive Category Words (DCW)

Technology (Modified TF/IDF strategy)

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Business Contributions

0

10

20

30

40

Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov.

GMS

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10

20

30

40

Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov.

GMS

(1) 2 big merchants2 million products 　 (2011/9)

FIX Merchant A FIX

2011 2011

(3) Expanding to more categories

(2) 2 categories, which include 1,000 merchants1 million products (2011/11)

Merchant B

→ Contributed to GMS

5 million products (2012/10)

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Research Topics

1. Rakuten Hub Category2. Category Correction3. Surf Shopping

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Online Shopping Offline Shopping

Search-orientedGood for finding a specific item

Browsing-orientedGood for looking around

3. Surf Shopping

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Motivation

Online Shopping Offline Shopping

Search-orientedGood for finding a specific item

Browsing-orientedGood for looking around

ConvenientFun! :-)

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Recommendation / Categories / Ranking

Convenient & Fun! :-)

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Associative Relations for SurfShopping

Cheese

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Cracker

Cheese

Wine

Associative Relations for SurfShopping

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Grape

Cheese cake

Pasta

Pizza

Grater

Cracker

SaladCheese knife

Cheese

Wine

Associative Relations for SurfShopping

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Relation Discovery technology

Yet, your sommelier will suggest pairings, will explain to you why this cheese might work better

with that wine.

As our cheese varies from mild to full flavored, a number of wine

varieties may work…

Tips for Pairing White Wines With Cheese

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Our Goal

Technologies for

Happy Shopping

Experiences

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… and also please join us!

We are hiring andlooking for internship students

Tokyo New York

Please contact us at dev-rit-coordinator@mail.rakuten.com