Meaningful Answer Generation of E-Commerce Question-Answering

To this end, we propose a novel answer generator with a review reasoning module and a prototype answer reader. Our key idea is to obtain the correct question-aware information from a large-scale collection of reviews and learn how to write a coherent and meaningful answer from an existing prototype answer. To be more specific, we propose a read-and-write memory consisting of selective writing units to conduct reasoning among these reviews.

We then employ a prototype reader consisting of comprehensive matching to extract the answer skeleton from the prototype answer. Finally, we propose an answer editor to generate the final answer by taking the question and the above parts as input. Conducted on a real-world dataset collected from an e-commerce platform, extensive experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

Human evaluation also demonstrates that our model can consistently generate specific and proper answers.