Expedia will use Artificial Intelligence to enhance travel search query understanding and improve the accuracy of search query resolution in Asian languages. The group announced it is collaborating with AI Singapore (AISG) under its flagship 100 Experiments (100E) programme to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) solution.
Expedia Group will provide a team of experienced engineers, data scientists and marketers to work with the AISG’s project lead, project managers and AI apprentices.
With English as the dominant language being used online by 25% of all Internet users, today’s search engines are extremely efficient in understanding travel search queries and providing query resolutions in the English language. However, when dealing with travel search queries conducted in Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese, the performance of the search engines declines significantly and the accuracy of query resolution dips, the collaborative group said in its release.
To start, the Expedia Group and AI Singapore project team will leverage natural language processing and machine learning to develop an AI-based model to enhance search query understanding and resolution in the Japanese language, before extending the model to other Asian languages to enhance online search efficiency.
“All across Asia Pacific, online travel spending is growing at a very rapid pace. By 2020, the Asia Pacific region will account for more than 40% of global online travel sales, surpassing North America and Western Europe. With language processing research focused predominantly in English, Expedia Group sees a critical need to look at leveraging technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing to enhance our AI solution to improve the efficiency of search query resolution for Asian languages,” said Kevin Ng, senior director, product and technology, Expedia Group.
“Through the collaboration with AI Singapore, this will not only enable us to gather the right data, technology and talents to build a viable AI solution that can enhance search query understanding, it also enables us to transform the online search experience for Asian travellers to better serve our consumers in the long haul.”
“While we collaborate and co-create the machine learning solution with Expedia Group, we are also using the opportunity to train Singaporean AI engineers via the AI Apprenticeship Programme,” said Laurence Liew, director, AI Industry Innovation, AI Singapore.
AI Singapore (AISG) is a national programme launched by the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF) to catalyse, synergise and boost Singapore’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to power our future, digital economy.
AISG is driven by a government-wide partnership comprising NRF, the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO), the Economic Development Board (EDB), the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), SGInnovate, and the Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS).
AISG’s flagship 100E programme matches companies which are keen to use AI to address their problem statements, with the local researchers who are interested to tackle those problems.
