eBay once again turned to university students to help it solve real-world problems. This week, the company announced the winners of its 4th Annual Machine Learning Challenge.
Last year, eBay tasked students with helping it improve the delivery estimates it displays to show shoppers approximately how long it will take for them to receive their items.
This year, it tasked students with helping it analyze eBay listing titles in order to help it classify listings. eBay explained:
“This year, applicants were given the challenge of building a model that can accurately extract and label the named entities in the dataset of item titles on eBay. Those “named entities” might include brands, locations, styles, product names, colors, materials, sizes, and other semantic strings, words and phrases that can help classify an item.”
eBay said the students used a machine-learning process called Named Entity Recognition (NER) and said applicants tackled the very real-world challenge any ecommerce platform faces: “how do we extract structured data from unstructured sources like listings?”
eBay announced two winners out of the 591 teams (consisting of 900 students from 157 colleges) that entered this year: Rupashi Sangal and Sanjayan Pradeep Kumar Sreekala, students at the University of California, San Diego
One of the attractions in entering the contest, according to Sangal, was the opportunity to work with a real-world dataset. eBay provided the students with a data set of eBay women’s handbag listings.
Sangal and Sreekala have accepted internships with eBay’s Structured Data Applied Research team in San Jose for the summer of 2023.
More information about this year’s eBay Machine Learning Challenge for University Students is available on the eBay corporate blog.
I used HUMAN LEARNING to figure out that eBay has no clue pretty much about anything and that it is a soulless money grubbing theft-tastic entity.
Not just eBay. Count Amazon too.
Cheap workforce? Explains causes of sales disruption and login issues. My listings are not showing up in searches. When i search for comps I can only see 5 items sold which may make me price items inadequately or incfluence decision of not putting item for sale thinking it is not selling or selling too low. Go figure.
good old flecebay…. free labor what a cesspool
I use structured data to create listing titles. Unfortunately, some titles are too long and must be shortened or reordered for readability. I doubt if an algorithm will be of much use unless the category and Item specifics are the input to the algorithm. Structured data mirroring the title and description is posted in item specifics. It is unfortunate that some eBay required Item Specifics in the Stamps category are corrupted abbreviations instead of English phrases. It is also unfortunate that eBay does not use the Scott catalog number appearing in most US listings as an Item Specific. Catalog number identify defining properties like design, denomination, color, paper and manufacturing characteristics. Item Condition, grade, and quality Item Specifics and the Condition Description help determine relative pricing for each individual stamp.
Perhaps the students would be better served to study thermodynamics. Starting with structured data to produce listings would provide better results than starting with unstructured data. How often does the local paint store offer to unmix paint?
Thank you for GSM⁉️
“Government Sponsored Money IE:(Earn as you learn programs ‼️)
So sleaze -bay Executives can sit @walkers on government & sellersmoney ‼️
How about a machine learning contest to fix the glitches promptly or even prevent them?
Yes. Yes. Fixing glitches promptly and creating board to report them that reflects also that the reported issues are being worked on.
Fixing issue with staying logged in would be good start. „Stay signed in” preferences are being ignored you are logged out out every couple of minutes and you have to complete 2 captcha in raw of picking tall buildings.
Why not develop an AI BOT to write titles and listings from catalog item specifics and the condition description? Could a more advanced version infer from listing images? The eBay website is going in the wrong direction with the “Advent Calendar” approach “optimized” for cell phones. Who can find errors and get an overview when so much is hidden?
Can listing BOTS from third-party applications supplant the eBay supplied game of battleship that masquerades as a selling interface?
How would eBay AI to deconstruct listings interpret AI created listings?