Organizing Real Estate Photo Collections...

Real Estate Websites like Trulia and Zillow host millions of property listings, with each listing consisting of rich textual description and images of the property. While rich in information, the discoverability of this data is limited by its unstructured nature. For Example, How do we learn if "granite countertops" is an interesting real estate term. And if it is, how can we assign it to one of the many photos associated with the property. In this talk we detail our approach to organize Trulia's unstructured content into rich photo collections similar to Houzz.com or Zillow Digs, without the need of any explicit user tagging. By leveraging the recent advances in deep learning for computer vision and nap, we first automatically construct a knowledge base of relevant real estate terms and then annotate our photo collections by fusing knowledge from a deep convolutional network for image recognition and a word embedding model. The novelty in our approach lies in our ability to scale to a large vocabulary of real estate terms without explicitly training a vision model for each one of them.