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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>August</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Intermediate Training of BERT for Product Matching</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Ralph Peeters</string-name>
          <email>ralph@informatik.uni-mannheim.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Christian Bizer</string-name>
          <email>chris@informatik.uni-mannheim.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Goran Glavaš</string-name>
          <email>goran@informatik.uni-mannheim.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Mannheim</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="DE">Germany</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2020</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>31</volume>
      <issue>2020</issue>
      <abstract>
        <p>Transformer-based models like BERT have pushed the state-of the-art for a wide range of tasks in natural language processing. General-purpose pre-training on large corpora allows Transformers to yield good performance even with small amounts of training data for task-specific fine-tuning. In this work, we apply BERT to the task of product matching in e-commerce and show that BERT is much more training data eficient than other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we show that we can further boost its efectiveness through an intermediate training step, exploiting large collections of product ofers. Our intermediate training leads to strong performance (&gt;90% F1) on new, unseen products without any product-specific fine-tuning. Further fine-tuning yields additional gains, resulting in improvements of up to 12% F1 for small training sets. Adding the masked language modeling objective in the intermediate training step in order to further adapt the language model to the application domain leads to an additional increase of up to 3% F1.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>CCS CONCEPTS</title>
      <p>• Information systems → Entity resolution; Electronic
commerce; • Computing methodologies → Neural networks.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>INTRODUCTION</title>
      <p>
        Product matching is the task of deciding if ofers originating from
diferent web-shops refer to the same real-world product. This is
a central task for e-commerce applications such as online market
places, price comparison portals, as well as for the construction
of product knowledge graphs [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref36">36</xref>
        ] such as the one currently built
by Amazon [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]. Diferent merchants present their products in
diferent ways, leading to heterogeneity among ofers of the same
product, which makes product matching a challenging task.
      </p>
      <p>
        In natural language processing (NLP), deep Transformer
networks [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref33">33</xref>
        ], pre-trained on large corpora via language modeling
objectives [7, 8, 22, inter alia] significantly pushed the
state-of-theart in a variety of downstream tasks [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15 ref34">15, 34</xref>
        ], including a number of
sentence-pair classification tasks, e.g. paraphrase identification [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ].
Recent studies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21 ref4">4, 21</xref>
        ] also demonstrate the efectiveness of
Transformer models like BERT [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] for the task of entity matching.
      </p>
      <p>
        In this work, we show that fine-tuning BERT for product
matching is much more training data eficient than the state-of-the-art
framework Deepmatcher [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ]. Fine-tuning BERT results in 15-20%
higher F1 scores in settings with small- and medium-sized training
sets. Even for large training sets, fine-tuning BERT still yields a 2%
improvement over Deepmatcher.
      </p>
      <p>
        Inspired by findings that intermediate training on large training
sets for related tasks [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref28 ref30">28, 30</xref>
        ] improves downstream performance,
we next introduce an intermediate training step before the final
ifne-tuning of the model for specific products. In this step, we train
BERT on product data from thousands of e-shops and show that
intermediate training leads to high performance (&gt;90% F1) and
good generalization to new products, even without any
productspecific fine-tuning. Poor generalization to new products is the main
weakness of Deepmatcher [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ], as shown in our previous work [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ].
Our intermediate training is particularly beneficial for fine-tuning
setups with limited training data: it leads to improvements of up to
12% F1 on new products with small training datasets, compared to
direct fine-tuning (i.e. without any intermediate training). Finally,
we show that adding domain-specific (self-supervised) language
modeling to the intermediate training leads to further gains of up
to 3% F1 in downstream product-matching tasks.
      </p>
      <p>All code and data of our experiments is available on GitHub1
which makes all results reproducible.
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>BERT FOR PRODUCT MATCHING</title>
      <p>
        Deep Transformer-based models like BERT [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] use stacked encoder
layers based on a self-attention mechanism [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref33">33</xref>
        ], which allows
every (sub-)word to attend to every other (sub-)word in a sequence,
enabling mutual semantic contextualization of words. The deep
architecture, i.e. stacking of attention layers, allows for
modeling of syntactic and semantic compositionality of the language
that stems from word interactions [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ]. Unlike static word
embeddings [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23 ref27 ref3">3, 23, 27</xref>
        ], where each word has one fixed vector regardless
of the context, pre-trained Transformers produce context-specific
vector representations of words, allowing, inter alia, to capture
diferent word senses (e.g. bank would have very diferent
representations in contexts in which it denotes a financial institution
from those in contexts where it denotes a river bank). BERT is
pretrained on a large corpus of text (concatenation of Wikipedia and
BookCorpus) using two pre-training objectives: (1) The masked
language modeling objective (MLM) aims to reconstruct (i.e. predict)
words that have been masked out in the input text from the context;
(2) The next sentence prediction (NSP) objective predicts if two
sentences are adjacent to each other in text or not – contributing to
downstream performance of text-pair classification tasks. The input
to the BERT model has the following format: [CLS] Sequence 1
[SEP] Sequence 2 [SEP]. Two sequences, comprising (sub-)word
1https://github.com/Weyoun2211/productbert-intermediate
tokens, are separated using [SEP] tokens; the sequence start token
[CLS] serves to capture the representation of the whole text-pair.
      </p>
      <p>After the pre-training step, it it possible to either use the output
representations of each word in downstream tasks (feature-based
approach) or to fine-tune the BERT model itself for these tasks
(fine-tuning-based approach), with the latter generally leading to
better performance. In this work, we adopt the standard fine-tuning
for sentence-pair classification: we feed the transformed
representation of the sequence start token [CLS], xCLS into a simple logistic
regression classifier:  =  (xCLS Wcl +cl ), with Wcl and bcl as well
as BERT’s parameters being optimized during fine-tuning.
2.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Datasets</title>
      <p>
        In our experiments, we use the training, validation and gold
standard (test) datasets from the computers category of the WDC
Product Corpus for Large-Scale Product Matching [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ]. These datasets
are derived from schema.org annotations from thousands of
webshops extracted from the Common Crawl. Relying on schema.org
annotations of product identifiers like GTINs or MPNs allows us
to directly create binary (matching or non-matching) labels for
our classification task, without the need for laborious manual
annotation. All labels of the test set used for final evaluation have
been manually checked. Previous experiments with these datasets
have shown that using schema.org ids as distant supervision
results in clean enough labels for training high-performance product
matchers [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        The computers test set encompasses positive pairs for 150 unique
products. The negative pairs for these products contain ofers for
595 additional products. The corresponding training sets contain
both positive and negative pairs for the same products. For more
details on the construction of the product corpus as well as the
training and test sets, we refer the reader to [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref29">29</xref>
        ] and to the project
website2. To test the eficiency of the classifiers w.r.t. training size,
we experiment with training sets of varying size: small, medium,
large, xlarge. Table 1 shows statistics of the training sets and test
set.
2.2
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Fine-tuning Setup</title>
      <p>We cast product matching as a binary classification task, i.e. given
two ofers, we predict if they represent the same real-world product.
Input for BERT (Sequence 1 and 2) is then the concatenation of
2http://webdatacommons.org/largescaleproductcorpus/v2/
the product data of each ofer. To this end, we first concatenate
all attributes of each product ofer into one string. We use the
attributes brand, title, description and specification table content and
concatenate them in this order.</p>
      <p>
        Experimental setup. We conduct all our experiments with
PyTorch [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref25">25</xref>
        ] using BERT’s implementation3 from the HuggingFace
Transformers library [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref35">35</xref>
        ]. All hyperparameters are set to their
defaults if not stated otherwise. We minimize the binary cross-entropy
loss using Adam [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ] as optimization algorithm. BERT allows for
input sequences of maximal length of 512 tokens: we first constrain
each attributes length to 5 (brand), 50 (title), 100 (description) and
200 (specification table content ) words respectively, dropping any
words outside that range, and further truncate long product
offers by removing tokens from their end until we satisfy BERT’s
constraint. We fine-tune all layers for 50 epochs with a linearly
decaying learning rate with warm-up over the first epoch. We use the
validation set for model selection and early stopping: if the F1 score
on the validation set does not improve over 10 consecutive epochs,
we stop the training. We use a fixed batch size of 32 and sweep
learning rates in the range [5e-6, 1e-5, 3e-5, 5e-5, 8e-5, 1e-4]. We
train three model instances for each hyperparameter configuration
and report the average performance.
      </p>
      <p>
        Baselines. We compare BERT-based product matching with
several baselines. First, we evaluate a simple word co-occurrence based
approach, where we feed binary bag-of-words features of the two
product ofers to traditional classification algorithms. We also test
the Magellan framework [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ] for entity resolution which generates
string- and numeric-similarity based features. Magellan constructs
these features depending on the data types of the input attributes.
We combine both the Magellan and the word co-occurrence
feature creation methods with XGBoost, Random Forest, Decision Tree,
linear SVM, and Logistic Regression as classification methods and
apply randomized search over the respective hyperparameter spaces.
Finally, we compare against Deepmatcher [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ], a state-of-the-art
neural entity resolution framework using pre-trained word
embeddings as input. Deepmatcher computes attribute-wise similarities
between two records and then combines these as features for the
matching decision. For Deepmatcher, we use fastText embeddings
trained on the English Wikipedia4 as input and allow for the
finetuning of word embeddings, which, albeit not part of the original
implementation, has been shown to improve performance [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ]. We
train all Deepmatcher instances for 50 epochs with default
parameters and only search for the optimal learning rate. For Deepmatcher
and BERT we use the method specific tokenizers for pre-processing,
for the other baselines we lower-case all attributes before further
processing.
2.3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Fine-tuning Results</title>
      <p>
        3We used the following pre-trained BERT instance: bert-base-uncased.
4https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/pretrained-vectors.html
obtain 2.3% F1 gain over Deepmatcher. Our results are in line with
the findings of Li et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ], though not fully comparable, as the
authors use DistilBERT [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref31">31</xref>
        ] and apply additional data augmentation
techniques. Overall, we can conclude that fine-tuning BERT is a
promising technique for product matching, especially in settings
with limited training data.
3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>INTERMEDIATE TRAINING ON</title>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>DOMAIN-SPECIFIC DATA</title>
      <p>BERT has been pre-trained on a general-purpose natural language
corpus, whose language as well as topics are rather diferent from
product descriptions. We thus test the intuitive assumption that
intermediate in-domain training – after BERT’s original pre-training
and before fine-tuning for specific products – can improve
matching performance. For the intermediate training we use training data
covering a wide range of products from thousands of e-shops.
3.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-9">
      <title>Building Intermediate Training Sets</title>
      <p>
        We leverage the WDC Product Corpus for Large-Scale Product
Matching [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref29">29</xref>
        ] and its product-cluster structure to build wide
coverage training sets consisting of millions of ofer pairs. The corpus
consists of clusters containing ofers for the same product. The
clusters have been derived using schema.org annotated ids as weak
supervision (see Section 2.1). In order to have an unbiased
evaluation, the clusters contained in the test set and fine-tuning training
sets are removed from the corpus prior to building the intermediate
training sets.
      </p>
      <p>We compare the efects of intermediate training on two
structurally diferent training sets. The first intermediate training set
contains only ofer pairs for the category computers: this allows
us to introduce more computer information into BERT and have
the Transformer network detect relevant linguistic phenomena for
recognizing matches between computer ofers. The second
training set contains pairs from four categories – computers, cameras,
watches and shoes – with fewer training pairs per product: this
ofers a wider selection of products (i.e., more versatile information
about what constitutes a product match for the model), but less
in-depth information for each product/category.</p>
      <p>We build the training sets as follows: for positive instances, we
select only clusters containing more than one ofer, from which we
can build at least one positive pair. We restrict ourselves to clusters
of size ≤80 after observing that very large clusters contain more
noise and may lead to degradation of performance. For each ofer
in each cluster we build up to 15 (computers) or 5 (4 categories)
positive pairs with the other ofers from that cluster. Half of those
are hard positives, created by a) applying cosine similarity between
bag-of-words vectors of concatenation of title and the first 5 words
of description and b) sorting ofer pairs by cosine similarity and
selecting pairs with the lowest scores. The remaining 50% are
selected by randomly pairing ofers from the same cluster. We create
negative pairs in a similar fashion: for each ofer taken for positives
pairs, we create the same amount of negatives pairs using ofers
from other clusters of the same category. Hard negatives (50%) are
pairs of ofers from diferent clusters with the highest cosine
similarity; the other half are randomly sampled pairs of ofers from
diferent clusters. Table 3 displays the statistics of the resulting
intermediate training sets.
3.2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-10">
      <title>Intermediate Training Procedure</title>
      <p>
        For the first set of experiments, the intermediate training is
performed with a single objective, the binary product matching task.
The architecture is exactly the same as for the fine-tuning
experiments. One model is trained for each of the training sets from
Table 3. After intermediate training, we evaluate the model with
and without final product-specific fine-tuning. We run the
intermediate training for 40 epochs with a linearly decaying learning
rate (starting from 5e-5) with 10,000 warmup steps and a batch
size of 256. Due to the long training times we train the first 90% of
epochs on sequences of length 128 and only the last 10% on the full
sequences of 512 tokens to speed up training, similar to the original
BERT training procedure [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>In the second set of experiments, we add the MLM objective
to the product matching objective and jointly optimize both in
the intermediate training step. We follow the original masking
procedure: we randomly select 15% of tokens for replacement; in
80% of the cases, we replace the token with the [MASK] token,
in 10% of the cases with a random vocabulary token, and in the
remaining 10% we keep the original token (i.e., we give up the
replacement). As in the original work, we train the Transformer
network by minimizing the cross-entropy loss over predictions of
masked tokens. After the intermediate training, we again evaluate
two model variants: with and without the final product-specific
matching fine-tuning.
Table 4 shows the results of the intermediate training procedure.
We compare the intermediate training on the computers training set
against the intermediate training on the training set comprising 4
product categories. We observe that even without final fine-tuning
(row ’none’ in Table 4), we achieve a very good matching
performance of 92% F1. This suggests that through the intermediate
training we inject category-specific knowledge into BERT’s
parameters, as it is evidently able to make good matching predictions for
products for which it had not seen any training examples. Once
the intermediate model is subjected to further fine-tuning on ofer
pairs from the training sets, we observe further improvements in all
settings, with gains being most prominent for the smallest training
set. Intermediate training followed by fine-tuning on small training
sets reaches a performance of ∼94% F1, which, without
intermediate pre-training (see Table 2), we previously obtained only on the
largest training set. Training on category-specific data ( computers)
generally yields marginally better performance than training on
the mix of 4 categories..</p>
      <p>
        Table 5 shows the results of adding the MLM objective to the
product matching objective in the intermediate training step using
the computers intermediate training set. Compared to the
corresponding settings in which the intermediate training did not
include MLM (see left half of the Table 4), the performance (with
ifne-tuning) increases by up to 3% F1, yielding a new top overall
matching performance (&gt;97% F1 for the largest training set and 96%
F1 for all other training sizes). This confirms the findings from
other application domains [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2 ref20">2, 20</xref>
        ] pointing to benefits of
domainspecific MLM pre-training. The original pre-training data likely
only contains few instances of product-specific vocabulary, as it
covers a wide range of topics. Applying intermediate MLM training
on domain-specific data allows for adaptation of the vocabulary
embeddings to the domain, resulting in better downstream
performance.
      </p>
      <p>In summary, subjecting BERT to an intermediate training step
with large amounts of product data leads to a model that generalizes
well to new unseen products from the same category and can be
easily fine-tuned with small amounts of product-specific training data
to further increase the performance for these products. Depending
on the structure of the intermediate training set, more training data
for a single category can lead to a small increase in performance
compared to a more heterogeneous training set encompassing a
larger set of products from several categories. Adding the MLM
objective to the intermediate training results in further
improvements in matching performance, suggesting that domain-specific
language modeling indeed successfully adapts BERT’s parameters
to the product domain.
4</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-11">
      <title>RELATED WORK</title>
      <p>
        Product matching, a task with rich history and large body of work
in both research and industry, can be seen as a special case of entity
resolution, which concerns itself with the disambiguation of entity
representations to their respective real-world entity [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5 ref6">5, 6</xref>
        ]. Early
approaches applied rule- and statistics-based methods [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ]. Since
the early 2000s, machine learning based methods have taken the
focus due to their strong performance [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]. In recent years, due
to the successes of deep learning in fields like computer vision
and natural language processing, researchers working on
entitymatching started to shift their attention towards these methods as
well [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref11 ref13 ref16 ref24 ref32 ref37">1, 11, 13, 16, 24, 32, 37</xref>
        ]. Recently, Transformer-based
architectures [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref33 ref8">8, 33</xref>
        ] were shown to produce state-of-the-art results [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21 ref4">4, 21</xref>
        ].
5
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-12">
      <title>CONCLUSION</title>
      <p>
        Transformer-based language models like BERT have had a
tremendous impact in the field of NLP, improving the state-of-the-art
performance in a wide variety of tasks. In this work, we demonstrate
the utility of BERT for product matching in e-commerce, showing
that it is much more training data eficient than Deepmatcher.
Performing intermediate training of BERT with large amounts of
product data from thousands of e-shops leads to a model with high
generalization performance (&gt;90% F1) for new (i.e. unseen) products.
We show that, if submitted to intermediate training, BERT reaches
peak performance with less product-specific training data than
without intermediate training. We achieve the best performance
if intermediate training combines two jointly-trained objectives:
(1) binary product-matching and (2) masked language modeling.
Category-specific intermediate training yields only slightly better
performance than intermediate training on cross-category data.
While intermediate product-matching training alone brings
substantial gains, adding the masked language modeling objective to
the intermediate training gives an additional performance edge of
up to 3% F1 in all setups. This is in line with observations from other
domains, such as scientific text [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2 ref20">2, 20</xref>
        ], that domain-specific
language modelling improves the performance of BERT for in-domain
downstream tasks.
      </p>
    </sec>
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