Web Search of Fashion Items with Multimodal Querying

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a novel multimodal fashion search paradigm where e-commerce data is searched with a multimodal query composed of both an image and text. In this setting, the query image shows a fashion product that the user likes and the query text allows to change certain product attributes to fit the product to the user's desire. Multimodal search gives users the means to clearly express what they are looking for. This is in contrast to current e-commerce search mechanisms, which are cumbersome and often fail to grasp the customer's needs. Multimodal search requires intermodal representations of visual and textual fashion attributes which can be mixed and matched to form the user's desired product, and which have a mechanism to indicate when a visual and textual fashion attribute represent the same concept. With a neural network, we induce a common, multimodal space for visual and textual fashion attributes where their inner product measures their semantic similarity. We build a multimodal retrieval model which operates on the obtained intermodal representations and which ranks images based on their relevance to a multimodal query. We demonstrate that our model is able to retrieve images that both exhibit the necessary query image attributes and satisfy the query texts. Moreover, we show that our model substantially outperforms two state-of-the-art retrieval models adapted to multimodal fashion search.