Learning to Personalize Recommendation based on Customers' Shopping Intents

Abstract: Understanding the customers' high level shopping intent, such as their desire to go camping or hold a birthday party, is critically important for an E-commerce platform; it can help boost the quality of shopping experience by enabling provision of more relevant, explainable, and diversified recommendations. However, such high level shopping intent has been overlooked in the industry due to practical challenges. In this work, we introduce Amazon's new system that explicitly identifies and utilizes each customer's high level shopping intents for personalizing recommendations. We develop a novel technique that automatically identifies various high level goals being pursued by the Amazon customers, such as "go camping", and "preparing for a beach party". Our solution is in a scalable fashion (in 14 languages across 21 countries). Then a deep learning model maps each customer's online behavior, e.g. product search and individual item engagements, into a subset of high level shopping intents. Finally, a realtime ranker considers both the identified intents as well as the granular engagements to present personalized intent-aware recommendations. Extensive offline analysis ensures accuracy and relevance of the new recommendations and we further observe an 10% improvement in the business metrics. This system is currently serving online traffic at amazon.com, powering several production features, driving significant business impacts