Topic Builder / Products

The Topic Builder lets you generate topics from grammars. In practice, it is rarely used since the Generate Topic dialogue (accessed from the 🪄 Generate Topics (0) button) automates almost everything.

Topic Builder / Generate Topics

Clicking the 🪄 Generate Topics (0) button brings up this dialogue.

This screen uses labels from the product feed to generate topics.

In the Positive Label Groups drop-down you can choose the label groups, any one of which are required for a topic to be generated. For instance, the user below has chosen category, sub-category and product_line. This means that all the generated topics will have at least one category label or at least one sub-category label or at least one product_line label.

You will always need to use the positive label group drop-down. This is because the topics that are generated can include labels which together don't make up a valid category page title. For instance, you could just use the audience label group by itself and then you might have women or men or one-year-olds or teenagers as the topics that are generated. These wouldn't make sense for a category page. A category page typically needs a noun and this maps to label groups like type, category or sub-category or maybe product_line.

If we already know what label groups are required, why don’t we just hard-code them directly, rather than asking you to do this for us? The problem is that the labels are generated dynamically from what the products are, and we don’t always know what label groups we will get in advance. So, for an educational resources site, as an example, some of the label groups that might come up might involve audience and format, with a topic like a worksheet for six-year-olds. Here, format could be a required label group even though there’s probably no other site that needs that. That’s why we ask you to fill this in.

The Negative Label Groups drop-down lets you choose label groups that must not appear in the generated topics. This means no topic generated will include labels from the groups you list here. In other words, any topic created will exclude all labels from the groups you select here.

It's unusual to need to use the Negative Label Groups dropdown. When we generate topics from keywords, sometimes those keywords can include navigational labels like the store label group, which indicates which store the user would like to buy a product from, be it online or offline. In this case it typically makes sense to exclude topics that mention store.

You can set the Ngram to choose how many labels you require in a topic. It can go from one to four. However, slightly confusingly, when you set it to one, then it's two labels and above. When you set it to four, it's up to four labels (we're working on a fix for this). Mostly, unigrams are going to be too generic, too fat-tail to be useful. So we normally would look for bigrams to 4-grams as a good range for candidate topics. Certainly 5-grams or 6-grams are also possible, but you do get a law of diminishing returns because there may be no search volume and it will be unusual for there to be enough products to have all of these labels.

You can set a Maximum Topic Count to limit how many topics are generated. For instance, you could set it to 100 or 1,000. This lets you quickly review the first hundred topics to verify they're being generated correctly.

You can check the Dry Run check box just to see the totals of topics that will be generated without generating topics This is useful when you want a quick sense of how many topics will be created. A big run might generate a million topics, which might take a lot of time. It can be useful to get a sense first.

When you’ve added the positive label groups, chosen the gram range (and optionally added one or more Negative Label Groups, a Max Topic count and/or checked the Dry Run box), you can click Generate Topic to start the agent to generate the topics. You can see that running in History. When it’s successfully finished and assuming you haven’t checked the Dry Run box, your topic export will be ready in Exports.

Topic Builder / Keywords

This view allows the user to add arbitrarily named category pages through a list of keywords. However, it requires a special setup from Similar.ai and by default most workspaces cannot use it.