Enriching a Fashion Knowledge Graph from Product Textual Descriptions

Abstract

Knowledge Graphs offer a very useful and powerful structure for representing information, consequently, they have been adopted as the backbone for many applications in e-commerce scenarios. In this paper, we describe an application of existing techniques for enriching the large-scale Fashion Knowledge Graph (FKG) that we build at Farfetch. In particular, we apply techniques for named entity recognition (NER) and entity linking (EL) in order to extract and link rich metadata from product textual descriptions to entities in the FKG. Having a complete and enriched FKG as an e-commerce backbone can have a highly valuable impact on downstream applications such as search and recommendations. However, enriching a Knowledge Graph in the fashion domain has its own challenges. Data representation is different from a more generic KG, like Wikidata and Yago, as entities (e.g. product attributes) are too specific to the domain, and long textual descriptions are not readily available. Data itself is also scarce, as labelling datasets to train supervised models is a very laborious task. Even more, fashion products display a high variability and require an intricate ontology of attributes to link to. We use a transfer learning based approach to train an NER module on a small amount of manually labeled data, followed by an EL module that links the previously identified named entities to the appropriate entities within the FKG. Experiments using a pre-trained model show that it is possible to achieve 89.75% accuracy in NER even with a small manually labeled dataset. Moreover, the EL module, despite relying on simple rulebased or ML models (due to lack of training data), is able to link relevant attributes to products, thus automatically enriching the FKG.