A Unified Prompt-aware Framework for Personalized Search and Explanation Generation

Product search is crucial for users to find and purchase products they need. Personalized product search, which models users’ search intent and provides tailored results, has become a prominent research problem in industry and academia. Recent studies often leverage knowledge graphs (KGs) to improve search performance and generate explanations for search results. However, existing KG-based methods treat search and explanation tasks separately and explore paths in KGs as explanations, creating a gap between search results and generated explanations. Also, path-formed explanations in KGs are not flexible enough to build correlations with the user’s current query. To address these challenges, we propose P-PEG, a unified prompt-aware framework for personalized product search and explanation generation. P-PEG leverages a pre-trained language model (PLM) and search signal to enhance the generation of user-understandable explanations. We introduce a prompt learning technique and design prompt generators for search and explanation generation tasks based on a fixed PLM. By incorporating search results in explanation-based prompts, we bridge the gap between search results and explanations, facilitating better interaction. Additionally, we utilize the user’s current query, historical search log, and KGs to personalize the explanations and inject task knowledge into PLM. Experimental results show that P-PEG outperforms existing methods in the explanation generation task of the three datasets and the search task of the Electronics dataset, and achieves comparable performance in the search task of the Cellphones & Accessories and CD & Vinyl datasets.