With the rapid growth of e-commerce in recent years, e-commerce platforms are becoming a primary place for people to find, compare and ultimately purchase products. To improve online shopping experience for consumers and increase sales for sellers, it is important to understand user intent accurately and be notified of its change timely. In this way, the right information could be offered to the right person at the right time. To achieve this goal, we propose a unified deep intent prediction network, named EdgeDIPN, which is deployed at the edge, i.e., mobile device, and able to monitor multiple user intent with different granularity simultaneously in real-time. We propose to train EdgeDIPN with multi-task learning, by which EdgeDIPN can share representations between different tasks for better performance and saving edge resources in the meantime. In particular, we propose a novel task-specific attention mechanism which enables different tasks to pick out the most relevant features from different data sources. To extract the shared representations more effectively, we utilize two kinds of attention mechanisms, where the multi-level attention mechanism tries to identify the important actions within each data source and the inter-view attention mechanism learns the interactions between different data sources. In the experiments conducted on a large-scale industrial dataset, EdgeDIPN significantly outperforms the baseline solutions. Moreover, EdgeDIPN has been deployed in the operational system of Alibaba. Online A/B testing results in several business scenarios reveal the potential of monitoring user intent in real-time. To the best of our knowledge, EdgeDIPN is the first full-fledged real-time user intent understanding center deployed at the edge and serving hundreds of millions of users in a large-scale e-commerce platform.
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