Improve retrieval of regional titles in streaming services with dense retrieval

Customers search for movie and series titles released across the world on streaming services like primevideo.com (PV), netflix.com (Netflix). In non-English speaking countries like India, Nepal and many others, the regional titles are transliterated from native language to English and are being searched in English. Given that there can be multiple transliterations possible for almost all the titles, searching for a regional title can be a very frustrating customer experience if these nuances are not handled correctly by the search system. Typing errors make the problem even more challenging. Streaming services uses spell correction and auto-suggestions/auto-complete features to address this issue up to certain extent. Auto-suggest fails when user searches keywords not in scope of the auto-suggest. Spell correction is effective at correcting common typing errors but as these titles doesn’t follow strict grammar rules and new titles constantly added to the catalog, spell correction have limited success.