  It is a challenging and practical research problem to obtain effective
compression of lengthy product titles for E-commerce. This is particularly
important as more and more users browse mobile E-commerce apps and more
merchants make the original product titles redundant and lengthy for Search
Engine Optimization. Traditional text summarization approaches often require a
large amount of preprocessing costs and do not capture the important issue of
conversion rate in E-commerce. This paper proposes a novel multi-task learning
approach for improving product title compression with user search log data. In
particular, a pointer network-based sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized
for title compression with an attentive mechanism as an extractive method and
an attentive encoder-decoder approach is utilized for generating user search
queries. The encoding parameters (i.e., semantic embedding of original titles)
are shared among the two tasks and the attention distributions are jointly
optimized. An extensive set of experiments with both human annotated data and
online deployment demonstrate the advantage of the proposed research for both
compression qualities and online business values.
