Walmart Inc.
System and method for determining substitutes for a requested product and the order to provide the substitutes

Abstract:

A system can include one or more processors and non-transitory computer-readable media storing computing instructions configured to run on the one or more processors and perform a method for determining one or more substitutes for a product requested in an inquiry from a user and the order of the one or more substitutes to be transmitted to the user. The method can comprise: receiving an inquiry from a user, wherein the inquiry comprises an image and a text describing a requested product; extracting one or more visual attributes of the requested product based on the image; extracting one or more textual attributes of the requested product based on the text; determining a first projected requested product, in a product graph relating to a domain of the requested product, based on the one or more visual attributes of the requested product; determining a second projected requested product in the product graph based on the one or more textual attributes of the requested product; and determining one or more substitutes for the requested product. In this embodiment, the one or more substitutes for the requested product can be determined by: determining one or more first candidates, each first candidate of the one or more first candidates existing in both the product graph and an inventory database and comprising a visual distance between the first projected requested product and the each first candidate in the product graph; determining one or more second candidates, each second candidate of the one or more second candidates existing in both the product graph and the inventory database and comprising a textual distance between the second projected requested product and the each second candidate in the product graph, the one or more substitutes comprising the one or more first candidates and the one or more second candidates; determining a score of a candidate substitute of the one or more substitutes based on a visual distance and a textual distance of the candidate substitute of the one or more substitutes; and sorting the one or more substitutes based on the score of the candidate substitute of the one or more substitutes. In this embodiment, after the one or more substitutes are determined and sorted, this method can further comprise: in response to receiving the inquiry from the user, automatically transmitting to the user higher ranked ones of the one or more substitutes. Additionally, in this embodiment, the product graph can be dynamically generated by a machine learning module based on information about the domain of the requested product; and the product graph can comprise: (a) one or more product nodes, the one or more product nodes comprising the one or more substitutes; (b) one or more entity nodes, the one or more entity nodes comprising the one or more visual attributes and the one or more textual attributes of the requested product; (c) one or more entity-entity connections between each pair of related entity nodes of the one or more entity nodes; (d) one or more product-entity connections between a product node of the one or more product nodes and an entity node of the one or more entity nodes, wherein the entity node is related to the product node; and (e) one or more product-product connection between a first product node of the one or more product nodes and a second product node of the one or more product nodes, wherein the first product node and the second product node are determined to be substitutable by or complimentary of each other. Other embodiments are disclosed.