Electronic commerce, or e-commerce, is the buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data online. E-commerce platforms come in many kinds, with global players such as Amazon, Airbnb, Alibaba, Booking.com, eBay, JD.com and platforms targeting specific geographic regions such as Bol.com and Flipkart.com.Information retrieval has a natural role to play in e-commerce, especially in connecting people to goods and services. Information discovery in e-commerce concerns different types of search (e.g., exploratory search vs. lookup tasks), recommender systems, and natural language processing in e-commerce portals. The rise in popularity of e-commerce sites has made research on information discovery in e-commerce an increasingly active research area. This is witnessed by an increase in publications and dedicated workshops in this space. Methods for information discovery in e-commerce largely focus on improving the effectiveness of e-commerce search and recommender systems, on enriching and using knowledge graphs to support e-commerce, and on developing innovative question answering and bot-based solutions that help to connect people to goods and services. In this survey, an overview is given of the fundamental infrastructure, algorithms, and technical solutions for information discovery in e-commerce. The topics covered include user behavior and profiling, search, recommendation, and language technology in e-commerce.

翻译：电子商务，即在线购买和销售商品或服务，或在线传输资金或数据。电子商务平台种类繁多，既有亚马逊、爱彼迎、阿里巴巴、Booking.com、eBay、京东等全球性平台，也有针对特定地理区域的平台，如Bol.com和Flipkart.com。信息检索在电子商务中天然扮演着重要角色，尤其是在连接人与商品及服务方面。电子商务中的信息发现涉及不同类型的搜索（例如，探索式搜索与查找任务）、推荐系统以及电子商务门户中的自然语言处理。电子商务网站的日益普及，使得电子商务信息发现研究成为一个日益活跃的研究领域。该领域出版物和专题研讨会的增加便是明证。电子商务信息发现的方法主要集中于提升电子商务搜索和推荐系统的有效性、丰富并利用知识图谱以支持电子商务，以及开发创新的问答和基于机器人的解决方案，以帮助连接人与商品及服务。本综述概述了电子商务信息发现的基础设施、算法和技术解决方案，涵盖的主题包括电子商务中的用户行为与画像、搜索、推荐和语言技术。