Finding duplicate offers in the online marketplace catalogue using transformer based methods : An exploration of transformer based methods for the task of entity resolution

Abstract: The amount of data available on the web is constantly growing, and e-commerce websites are no exception. Considering the abundance of available information, finding offers for the same product in the catalogue of different retailers represents a challenge. This problem is an interesting one and addresses the needs of multiple actors. A customer is interested in finding the best deal for the product they want to buy. A retailer wants to keep up to date with the competition and adapt its pricing strategy accordingly. Various services already offer the possibility of finding duplicate products in catalogues of e-commerce retailers, but their solutions are based on matching a Global Trade Identification Number (GTIN). This strategy is limited because a GTIN may not be made publicly available by a competitor, may be different for the same product exported by the manufacturer to different markets or may not even exist for low-value products. The field of Entity Resolution (ER), a sub-branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP), focuses on solving the issue of matching duplicate database entries when a deterministic identifier is not available. We investigate various solutions from the the field and present a new model called Spring R-SupCon that focuses on low volume datasets. Our work builds upon the recently introduced model, R-SupCon, introducing a new learning scheme that improves R-SupCon’s performance by up to 74.47% F1 score, and surpasses Ditto by up 12% F1 score for low volume datasets. Moreover, our experiments show that smaller language models can be used for ER with minimal loss in performance. This has the potential to extend the adoption of Transformer-based solutions to companies and markets where datasets are difficult to create, like it is the case for the Swedish marketplace Fyndiq.