Product Question Answering in E -Commerce: A Survey (2023)

Abstract: Product question answering (PQA), aiming to automatically provide instant responses to customer’s questions in E-Commerce platforms, has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Compared with typical QA problems, PQA exhibits unique challenges such as the subjectivity and reliability of user-generated contents in E-commerce platforms. Therefore, various problem settings and novel methods have been proposed to capture these special characteristics. In this paper, we aim to systematically review existing research efforts on PQA. Specifically, we categorize PQA studies into four problem settings in terms of the form of provided answers. We analyze the pros and cons, as well as present existing datasets and evaluation protocols for each setting. We further summarize the most significant challenges that characterize PQA from general QA applications and discuss their corresponding solutions. Finally, we conclude this paper by providing the prospect on several future directions.

## problems and approaches product question answering (pqa) aims to produce an answer a to a given natural language question q based on a set of supporting documents d, encoder classifier yes/no/not sure (a) opinion-based (b) extraction-based (c) retrieval-based encoder decoder (d) generation-@xmath0: four main-stream problem settings in pqa studies. ## challenges and solutions although the aforementioned pqa methods are developed based on different problem settings, there are some common challenges in pqa, as presented in ## prospects and future directions considering the challenges summarized in this paper, we point out several promising prospects and future directions for pqa studies: ## conclusions this paper makes the first attempt to overview recent advances on pqa. we systematically categorize recent pqa studies into four problem settings, including opinion-based, extraction-based, retrieval-based, and generation-based, and summarize the existing methods and evaluation protocols in each category. we also analyze the typical challenges that distinguish pqa from other qa studies. finally, we highlight several potential directions for facilitating future studies on pqa.