Graphite: A Graph-Based Extreme Multi-Label Short Text Classifier for Keyphrase Recommendation

Keyphrase Recommendation has been a pivotal problem in advertising and e-commerce where advertisers/sellers are recommended keyphrases (search queries) to bid on to increase their sales. It is a challenging task due to the plethora of items shown on online platforms and various possible queries that users search while showing varying interest in the displayed items. Moreover, query/keyphrase recommendations need to be made in real-time and in a resource-constrained environment. This problem can be framed as an Extreme Multi-label (XML) Short text classification by tagging the input text with keywords as labels. Traditional neural network models are either infeasible or have slower inference latency due to large label spaces. We present Graphite, a graph-based classifier model that provides real-time keyphrase recommendations that are on par with standard text classification models. Furthermore, it doesn’t utilize GPU resources, which can be limited in production environments. Due to its lightweight nature and smaller footprint, it can train on very large datasets, where state-of-the-art XML models fail due to extreme resource requirements. Graphite is deterministic, transparent, and intrinsically more interpretable than neural network-based models. We present a comprehensive analysis of our model’s performance across forty categories spanning eBay’s English-speaking sites.