Enriching Product Ads with Metadata from HTML Annotations

Product ads are a popular form of search advertizing offered by major search engines, including Yahoo, Google and Bing. Unlike traditional search ads, product ads include structured product specifications, which allow search engine providers to perform better keyword-based ad retrieval. However, the level of completeness of the product specifications varies and strongly influences the performance of ad retrieval. On the other hand, online shops are increasing adopting semantic markup languages such as Microformats, RDFa and Microdata, to annotate their content, making large amounts of product description data publicly available. In this paper, we present an approach for enriching product ads with structured data extracted from thousands of online shops offering Microdata annotations. In our approach we use structured product ads as supervision for training feature extraction models able to extract attribute-value pairs from unstructured product descriptions. We use these features to identify matching products across different online shops and enrich product ads with the extracted data. Our evaluation on three product categories related to electronics show promising results in terms of enriching product ads with useful product data.