Geographical Address Models in the Indian e-Commerce

Abstract

Unambiguous customer addresses are important for the e-Commerce companies in timely and accurate delivery of shipments. In many developing countries a prescribed structure is not usually followed in practice. It is observed that the customer addresses contain additional text such as instructions to the delivery team. Further not every address has an associated geolocation information in many countries. Thus address understanding, address classification, and clustering of similar but noisy addresses are critical. In addition to last mile delivery solutions, the models help reduce buyer fraud and understanding returns. In view of noisy nature of customer addresses and non-availability of associated geolocation, the above problems are effectively solved with the help of NLP. The proposed talk traces the challenges in the Indian addresses in the context of e-commerce, solution approaches, and their extensions during the last 8 years. The talk is based on the author's own experience, his publications as well as developments in this topic across the industry over these years.