Authors:
João Coelho
1
;
2
;
António Neto
1
;
3
;
Miguel Tavares
1
;
4
;
Carlos Coutinho
1
;
5
;
3
;
João Oliveira
5
;
6
;
3
;
Ricardo Ribeiro
7
;
3
and
Fernando Batista
7
;
3
Affiliations:
1
Caixa Mágica Software, Lisboa, Portugal
;
2
Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisboa, Portugal
;
3
Iscte - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Av. das Forças Armadas, Portugal
;
4
ULHT - Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Portugal
;
5
Information Sciences, Technologies and Architecture Research Center (ISTAR-IUL), Lisboa, Portugal
;
6
Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), Lisboa, Portugal
;
7
INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Semantic Search, Word Embeddings, ElasticSearch, Mobile Applications, Transformer-based Models.
Abstract:
Search engines are being extensively used by Mobile App Stores, where millions of users world-wide use them every day. However, some stores still resort to simple lexical-based search engines, despite the recent advances in Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing, which allow for richer semantic strategies. This work proposes an approach for semantic search of mobile applications that relies on transformer-based language models, fine-tuned with the existing textual information about known mobile applications. Our approach relies solely on the application name and on the unstructured textual information contained in its description. A dataset of about 500 thousand mobile apps was extended in the scope of this work with a test set, and all the available textual data was used to fine-tune our neural language models. We have evaluated our models using a public dataset that includes information about 43 thousand applications, and 56 manually annotated non-
exact queries. The results show that our model surpasses the performance of all the other retrieval strategies reported in the literature. Tests with users have confirmed the performance of our semantic search approach, when compared with an existing deployed solution.
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