E-commerce customers frequently seek detailed product information for
purchase decisions, commonly contacting sellers directly with extended queries.
This manual response requirement imposes additional costs and disrupts buyer's
shopping experience with response time fluctuations ranging from hours to days.
We seek to automate buyer inquiries to sellers in a leading e-commerce store
using a domain-specific federated Question Answering (QA) system. The main
challenge is adapting current QA systems, designed for single questions, to
address detailed customer queries. We address this with a low-latency,
sequence-to-sequence approach, MESSAGE-TO-QUESTION ( M2Q ). It reformulates
buyer messages into succinct questions by identifying and extracting the most
salient information from a message. Evaluation against baselines shows that M2Q
yields relative increases of 757% in question understanding, and 1,746% in
answering rate from the federated QA system. Live deployment shows that
automatic answering saves sellers from manually responding to millions of
messages per year, and also accelerates customer purchase decisions by
eliminating the need for buyers to wait for a reply

通过使用特定领域的联邦问答系统，我们将电子商务购买者的问题自动化，从而节省卖家必须手动回复的时间并加速购买决策。