Natural Language Processing

September 1, 2022
Not everyone wants to speak with someone when they need to set up a return or report an issue with their order. We built an NLP-powered Virtual Assistant to provide our customers a fast and easy option that’s available 24/7 to resolve their service-related issues.
10 Min Read
March 16, 2022
When customers submit search queries, such as “ivory jute oriental,” it is essential for the search engine to understand which types of products they are looking for. In this case, the customer is likely shopping for an area rug. Equipped with this knowledge, we can tailor the search results page by displaying area rug-specific filters and banners and refine the search results by first showing area rugs. At Wayfair Search, the Query Classifier Model performs this task of real-time prediction of the desired product types based on user search queries. This blog post discusses how we designed, trained, and deployed this deep learning classification model at SearchTech.
8 Min Read
June 3, 2021
In early August, the Data Science (DS) team put on their first DS-wide hackathon. The global hackathon event brought together Boston and Berlin based data scientists for one day of hacking and demos. The event challenged teams to think big about how algorithms can transform Wayfair’s business and help unveil unseen possibilities. Some successful tools and products on our site, like our Visual Search tool, started as hackathon projects! The hackathon is a fun challenge to try out new methods or algorithms, explore a different part of the business, and collaborate with team members across disciplines.
5 Min Read
October 15, 2018
Search is critical to the customer experience at Wayfair. What we show on the first page of results is incredibly important for users. The graph below shows what many people might already know when it comes to browsing and search habits: The majority of customers rarely look beyond the products on the first page of search results.
7 Min Read