(Vector) Space is Not the Final Frontier: Product Search as Program Synthesis

As ecommerce continues growing, huge investments in ML and NLP for Information Retrieval are following. While the vector space model dominated retrieval modelling in product search - even as vectorization itself greatly changed with the advent of deep learning -, our position paper argues in a contrarian fashion that program synthesis provides significant advantages for many queries and a significant number of players in the market. We detail the industry significance of the proposed approach, sketch implementation details, and address common objections drawing from our experience building a similar system at Tooso.