Voting with Generative AI for German Compound Splitting in E-commerce Search

Compound words are a grammatical structure that allows forming new words by composing existing words. For e-commerce search in German, it is essential to split these compounds into meaningful parts because item titles often use the joint form while search queries are often split. We propose a method for German compound splitting leveraging a large language model (LLM) with a voting mechanism and a hyperparameter search for automatically optimizing prompt and parameter combinations. Our evaluation of the proposed method on human-created gold standard data for e-commerce shows that it outperforms existing methods for compound splitting in this domain.