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Language Agnostic Representation Learning for Product Shopping and Discovery

Series: Department Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Karthik Subbian Principal Scientist and Senior Manager Amazon

Date/Time: Dec 20 11:00:00

Location: CSA Lecture Hall (Room No. 117, Ground Floor)

Faculty Advisor:

Abstract:
Have you ever wondered how we serve high quality content at Amazon across different languages in product shopping and discovery? In this talk I will touch upon various scientific challenges involved in serving high quality content to our customers. Particularly, when customers are looking for specific products, we select and show items that customers would like to purchase using query-product classification models. Learning a separate model for each language (across different countries Amazon.com vs Amazon.in) is challenging as the amount of (hard) negatives available is sparse and hard to obtain. We solve this problem in a language-agnostic manner using additional structured relationships, such as query-query alignment and product-product alignment. I will discuss how this additional data along with transformer encoder based architecture with scaled self-attention can outperform several state-of-the-art benchmarks. This paper is accepted for WSDM 2020. At the end, I will discuss various job opportunities and academic collaborations to work with us in our brand new division here at Bangalore.

Speaker Bio:
Karthik Subbian is a principal scientist and senior manager at Amazon with more than 15 years of industry experience. He leads a team of scientists and engineers to build the next generation shopping decision engine. He was a research scientist at Facebook, before coming to Amazon, where he had explored information propagation and user modeling problems using the social network structure and its interactions. Earlier to that, he was working at IBM T.J. Watson research center in the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences division. His areas of expertise include machine learning, information retrieval, and large-scale network analysis. He holds a masters degree from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, both in computer science. Karthik has won numerous prestigious awards, including the IBM Ph.D. fellowship, best paper award at Siam Data Mining (SDM) conference 2013 and Informs Edelman laureate award 2013.

Host Faculty: Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharyya