CardRewriter: Leveraging Knowledge Cards for Long-Tail Query Rewriting on Short-Video Platforms

Short-video platforms have rapidly become a new generation of information retrieval systems, where users formulate queries to access desired videos. However, user queries, especially long-tail ones, often suffer from spelling errors, incomplete phrasing, and ambiguous intent, resulting in mismatches between user expectations and retrieved results. While large language models (LLMs) have shown success in long-tail query rewriting within e-commerce, they struggle on short-video platforms, where proprietary content such as short videos, live streams, micro dramas, and user social networks falls outside their training distribution. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{CardRewriter}, an LLM-based framework that incorporates domain-specific knowledge to enhance long-tail query rewriting. For each query, our method aggregates multi-source knowledge relevant to the query and summarizes it into an informative and query-relevant knowledge card. This card then guides the LLM to better capture user intent and produce more effective query rewrites. We optimize CardRewriter using a two-stage training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning followed by group relative policy optimization, with a tailored reward system balancing query relevance and retrieval effectiveness. Offline experiments show that CardRewriter substantially improves rewriting quality for queries targeting proprietary content. Online A/B testing further confirms significant gains in long-view rate (LVR) and click-through rate (CTR), along with a notable reduction in initiative query reformulation rate (IQRR). Since September 2025, CardRewriter has been deployed on Kuaishou, one of China's largest short-video platforms, serving hundreds of millions of users daily.