ECLASS-Augmented Semantic Product Search for Electronic Components
This study addresses the lexical mismatch between natural language queries and structured descriptions of electronic components by proposing a large language model (LLM)-assisted dense retrieval and re-ranking approach that integrates hierarchical semantic information from the ECLASS standard. For the first time, the hierarchical ontology of ECLASS is embedded into the retrieval framework to bridge the semantic gap between user intent and sparse product descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a Hit@5 score of 94.3% on expert queries, substantially outperforming both BM25 (31.4%) and baseline LLM-based web search approaches. The method delivers significant improvements in both retrieval accuracy and efficiency, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging standardized ontological structures to enhance semantic alignment in technical domains.