E-commerce Search via Content Collaborative Graph Neural Network

Recently, many E-commerce search models are based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Despite their promising performances, they are (1) lacking proper semantic representation of product contents; (2) less efficient for industry-scale graphs; and (3) less accurate on long-tail queries and cold-start products. To address these problems simultaneously, this paper proposes CC-GNN, a novel Content Collaborative Graph Neural Network. Firstly, CC-GNN enables content phrases to participate explicitly in graph propagation to capture the proper meaning of phrases and semantic drifts. Secondly, CC-GNN presents several efforts towards a more scalable graph learning framework, including efficient graph construction, MetaPath-guided Message Passing, and Difficulty-aware Representation Perturbation for graph contrastive learning. Furthermore, CC-GNN adopts Counterfactual Data Supplement at both supervised and contrastive learning to resolve the long-tail/cold-start problems. Extensive experiments on a real E-commerce dataset of 100-million-scale nodes show that CC-GNN produces significant improvements over existing methods (i.e., more than 10% improvements in terms of several key evaluation metrics for overall, long-tail queries and cold-start products) while reducing computational complexity. The proposed components of CC-GNN can be applied to other models for search and recommendation tasks. Experiments on a public dataset show that applying the proposed components can improve the performance of different recommendation models.