Exploring alternate modalities for tag recommendation

Abstract

Etsy is an online marketplace (www.etsy.com) for users selling unique handcrafted goods and vintage wares. Etsy’s sellers currently maintain a total of 25 million active listings in the marketplace. Usability research has identified the listing creation process as a pain point for sellers. Adding tags to a listing can be a particularly challenging task for new sellers who are unfamiliar with the tagging taxonomy. Automatically generated tags can reduce confusion and minimize the effort required to list new items for sale in an online marketplace. In this paper we explore listings images in the absence of text modality for automatic tag suggestion. Coupled with the ability for users to manually add tags, the proposed model can ease the burden of tagging and increase the utility of retrieval systems built on top of tagging data.