Fifty Shades of Pink: Understanding Color in e-commerce using Knowledge Graphs

The color of the products is one of the most prevalent aspects in many e-commerce domains, and it is one of the decisive purchasing factors. Besides having thousands of color variations and shades, many brands continuously develop proprietary colors and color names to attract more customers. This often leads to color ambiguity (textual and visual), and vocabulary mismatch between buyers and sellers. Therefore, it is crucial for any e-commerce search engine to correctly identify the buyer's color intent and match it to the corresponding product listings. To address this challenge, in this work, we introduce a color query expansion approach using color Knowledge Graphs. We use Knowledge Graphs to unambiguously identify all the colors based on their properties, and the relationships to other colors, which allows us to perform semantic query expansion. Similar expansion concepts could be applied to domains outside of color.