An Entity-Matching System Based on Multimodal Data for Two Major E-Commerce Stores in Mexico

Abstract

E-commerce has grown considerably in Latin America in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. E-commerce users in English-speaking and Chinese-speaking countries have web-based tools to compare the prices of products offered by various retailers. The task of product comparison is known as entity matching in the data-science domain. This paper proposes the first entity-matching system for product comparison in Spanish-speaking e-commerce. Given the lack of uniformity of e-commerce sites in Mexico, we opted for a bimodal entity-matching system that uses the image and textual description of products from two of the largest e-commerce stores in Mexico. State-of-the-art techniques in natural language processing and machine learning were used to develop this research. The resulting system achieves F1 values of approximately 80%, representing a significant step towards consolidating a product-matching system in Spanish-speaking e-commerce.