EcomScriptBench: A multi-task benchmark for e-commerce script planning via step-wise intention-driven product association

Goal-oriented script planning, or the ability to plan coherent sequences of actions toward specific goals, is commonly used by humans to plan for daily activities. In e-commerce, customers increasingly seek LLM-based assistants to plan for them with a script and recommend products at each step, thereby facilitating convenient and efficient shopping experiences. However, this capability remains under-explored due to several challenges, including the inability of LLMs to simultaneously conduct script planning and product retrieval, difficulties in matching products caused by semantic discrepancies between planned actions and search queries, and a lack of methods and benchmark data for evaluation. In this paper, we stepf orward by formally defining the task of E-commerce Script Planning (EcomScript) as three sequential subtasks. We propose a novel framework that enables the scalable generation of product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. By applying our framework to real-world e-commerce data, we construct the very first large-scale EcomScript dataset, EcomScriptBench, which includes 605,229 scripts sourced from 2.4 million products. Human annotations are then conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset, forming an evaluation benchmark. Extensive experiments reveal that current (L)LMs face significant challenges with EcomScript tasks, even after fine-tuning, while injecting product purchase intentions improves their performance.