Who wrote this book? a challenge for e-commerce

Abstract

Modern e-commerce catalogs contain millions of references, associated with textual and visual information that is of paramount importance for the products to be found via search or browsing. Of particular significance is the book category, where the author name(s) field poses a significant challenge. Indeed, books written by a given author might be listed with different authors' names due to abbreviations, spelling variants and mistakes, among others. To solve this problem at scale, we design a composite system involving open data sources for books, as well as deep learning components, such as approximate match with Siamese networks and name correction with sequence-tosequence networks. We evaluate this approach on product data from the e-commerce website Rakuten France, and find that the top proposal of the system is the normalized author name with 72% accuracy.