Many applications that process social data, such as tweets, must extract entities from tweets (e.g., "Obama" and "Hawaii" in "Obama went to Hawaii"), link them to entities in a knowledge base (e.g., Wikipedia), classify tweets into a set of predefined topics, and assign descriptive tags to tweets. Few solutions exist today to solve these problems for social data, and they are limited in important ways. Further, even though several industrial systems such as OpenCalais have been deployed to solve these problems for text data, little if any has been published about them, and it is unclear if any of the systems has been tailored for social media. In this paper we describe in depth an end-to-end industrial system that solves these problems for social data. The system has been developed and used heavily in the past three years, first at Kosmix, a startup, and later at Wal-martLabs. We show how our system uses a Wikipedia-based global "real-time" knowledge base that is well suited for social data, how we interleave the tasks in a synergistic fashion, how we generate and use contexts and social signals to improve task accuracy, and how we scale the system to the entire Twitter firehose. We describe experiments that show that our system outperforms current approaches. Finally we describe applications of the system at Kosmix and WalmartLabs, and lessons learned.

The ability to let users search for products conveniently in product database is critical to the success of e-commerce. Although structured query languages (e.g. SQL) can be used to effectively access the product database, it is very difficult for end users to learn and use. In this paper, we study how to optimize search over structured product entities (represented by specifications) with keyword queries such as "cheap gaming laptop". One major difficulty in this problem is the vocabulary gap between the specifications of products in the database and the keywords people use in search queries. To solve the problem, we propose a novel probabilistic entity retrieval model based on query generation, where the entities would be ranked for a given keyword query based on the likelihood that a user who likes an entity would pose the query. Different ways to estimate the model parameters would lead to different variants of ranking functions. We start with simple estimates based on the specifications of entities, and then leverage user reviews and product search logs to improve the estimation. Multiple estimation algorithms are developed based on Maximum Likelihood and Maximum a Posteriori estimators. We evaluate the proposed product entity retrieval models on two newly created product search test collections. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing retrieval models, benefiting from the modeling of attribute-level relevance. Despite the focus on product retrieval, the proposed modeling method is general and opens up many new opportunities in analyzing structured entity data with unstructured text data. We show the proposed probabilistic model can be easily adapted for many interesting applications including facet generation and review annotation.

The booming of e-commerce in recent years has led to the generation of large amounts of product search log data. Product search log is a unique new data with much valuable information and knowledge about user preferences over product attributes that is often hard to obtain from other sources. While regular search logs (e.g., Web search logs) contain click-throughs for unstructured text documents (e.g., web pages), product search logs contain clickth-roughs for structured entities defined by a set of attributes and their values. For instance, a laptop can be defined by its size, color, cpu, ram, etc. Such structures in product entities offer us opportunities to mine and discover detailed useful knowledge about user preferences at the attribute level, but they also raise significant challenges for mining due to the lack of attribute-level observations.In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic mixture model for attribute-level analysis of product search logs. The model is based on a generative process where queries are generated by a mixture of unigram language models defined by each attribute-value pair of a clicked entity. The model can be efficiently estimated using the ExpectationMaximization (EM) algorithm. The estimated parameters, including the attribute-value language models and attributevalue preference models, can be directly used to improve product search accuracy, or aggregated to reveal knowledge for understanding user intent and supporting business intelligence. Evaluation of the proposed model on a commercial product search log shows that the model is effective for mining and analyzing product search logs to discover various kinds of useful knowledge.

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