Graph Representation Learning-Based Recommender Systems

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Personalized recommendation has been applied to many online services such as E-commerce and adverting. It facilitates users to discover a small set of relevant items, which meet their personalized interests, from many choices. Nowadays, various auxiliary information on users and items become increasingly available in online platforms, such as user demographics, social relations, and item knowledge. More recent evidences suggests that incorporating such auxiliary data with collaborative filtering can better capture the underlying and complex user-item relationships, and further achieve higher recommendation quality. In this thesis, we focus on auxiliary data with graph structure, such as social networks and knowledge graphs (KG). For example, we can improve recommendation performance by mining social relationships between users, and also by using knowledge graphs to enhance the semantics of recommended items. Network representation learning aims to represent each vertex in a network (graph) as a low-dimensional vector while still preserving its structural information. Due to the availability of massive graph data in recommender systems, it is a promising approach to combine network representation learning with recommendation. Applying the learned graph features to recommender systems will effectively enhance the learning ability of the recommender systems and improve the accuracy and user satisfaction of the recommender systems. For network representation learning and its application in recommendation systems, the major contributions of this thesis are as follows: (1) Attention-based Adversarial Autoencoder for Multi-scale Network Embedding. Existing Network representation methods usually adopt a one-size-fits-all approach when concerning multi-scale structure information, such as first- and second-order proximity of nodes, ignoring the fact that different scales play different roles in embedding learning. We propose an Attention-based Adversarial Autoencoder Network Embedding (AAANE) framework, which promotes the collaboration of different scales and lets them vote for robust representations. (2) Multi-modal Multi-view Bayesian Semantic Embedding for Community Question Answering: Semantic embedding has demonstrated its value in latent representation learning of data, and can be effectively adopted for many applications. However, it is difficult to propose a joint learning framework for semantic embedding in Community Question Answer (CQA), because CQA data have multi-view and sparse properties. In this thesis, we propose a generic Multi-modal Multi-view Semantic Embedding (MMSE) framework via a Bayesian model for question answering. (3) Context-Dependent Propagating-based Video Recommendation in Multi-modal Heterogeneous Information Networks. Conventional approaches to video recommendation primarily focus on exploiting content features or simple user-video interactions to model the users’ preferences. However these methods fail to model the complex video context interdependency, which is obscure/hidden in heterogeneous auxiliary data. In this paper, we propose a Context-Dependent Propagating Recommendation network (CDPRec) to obtain accurate video embedding and capture global context cues among videos in HINs. The CDPRec can iteratively propagate the contexts of a video along links in a graph-structured HIN and explore multiple types of dependencies among the surrounding video nodes. (4) Knowledge Graph Enhanced Neural Collaborative Filtering. Existing neural collaborative filtering (NCF) recommendation methods suffer from severe sparsity problem. Knowledge Graph (KG), which commonly consists of fruitful connected facts about items, presents an unprecedented opportunity to alleviate the sparsity problem. However, NCF only methods can hardly model the high-order connectivity in KG, and ignores complex pairwise correlations between user/item embedding dimensions. To address these issues, we propose a novel Knowledge graph enhanced Neural Collaborative Recommendation (K-NCR) framework, which effectively combines user-item interaction information and auxiliary knowledge information for recommendation

Sequential Recommendation with Self-Attentive Multi-Adversarial Network

Recently, deep learning has made significant progress in the task of sequential recommendation. Existing neural sequential recommenders typically adopt a generative way trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). When context information (called factor) is involved, it is difficult to analyze when and how each individual factor would affect the final recommendation performance. For this purpose, we take a new perspective and introduce adversarial learning to sequential recommendation. In this paper, we present a Multi-Factor Generative Adversarial Network (MFGAN) for explicitly modeling the effect of context information on sequential recommendation. Specifically, our proposed MFGAN has two kinds of modules: a Transformer-based generator taking user behavior sequences as input to recommend the possible next items, and multiple factor-specific discriminators to evaluate the generated sub-sequence from the perspectives of different factors. To learn the parameters, we adopt the classic policy gradient method, and utilize the reward signal of discriminators for guiding the learning of the generator. Our framework is flexible to incorporate multiple kinds of factor information, and is able to trace how each factor contributes to the recommendation decision over time. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods, in terms of effectiveness and interpretability

System upgrade: realising the vision for UK education

A report summarising the findings of the TEL programme in the wider context of technology-enhanced learning and offering recommendations for future strategy in the area was launched on 13th June at the House of Lords to a group of policymakers, technologists and practitioners chaired by Lord Knight. The report – a major outcome of the programme – is written by TEL director Professor Richard Noss and a team of experts in various fields of technology-enhanced learning. The report features the programme’s 12 recommendations for using technology-enhanced learning to upgrade UK education

EGO: a personalised multimedia management tool

The problems of Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) sys- tems can be attributed to the semantic gap between the low-level data representation and the high-level concepts the user associates with images, on the one hand, and the time-varying and often vague nature of the underlying information need, on the other. These problems can be addressed by improving the interaction between the user and the system. In this paper, we sketch the development of CBIR interfaces, and introduce our view on how to solve some of the problems of the studied interfaces. To address the semantic gap and long-term multifaceted information needs, we propose a "retrieval in context" system. EGO is a tool for the management of image collections, supporting the user through personalisation and adaptation. We will describe how it learns from the user's personal organisation, allowing it to recommend relevant images to the user. The recommendation algorithm is detailed, which is based on relevance feedback techniques

Relational Collaborative Filtering:Modeling Multiple Item Relations for Recommendation

Existing item-based collaborative filtering (ICF) methods leverage only the relation of collaborative similarity. Nevertheless, there exist multiple relations between items in real-world scenarios. Distinct from the collaborative similarity that implies co-interact patterns from the user perspective, these relations reveal fine-grained knowledge on items from different perspectives of meta-data, functionality, etc. However, how to incorporate multiple item relations is less explored in recommendation research. In this work, we propose Relational Collaborative Filtering (RCF), a general framework to exploit multiple relations between items in recommender system. We find that both the relation type and the relation value are crucial in inferring user preference. To this end, we develop a two-level hierarchical attention mechanism to model user preference. The first-level attention discriminates which types of relations are more important, and the second-level attention considers the specific relation values to estimate the contribution of a historical item in recommending the target item. To make the item embeddings be reflective of the relational structure between items, we further formulate a task to preserve the item relations, and jointly train it with the recommendation task of preference modeling. Empirical results on two real datasets demonstrate the strong performance of RCF. Furthermore, we also conduct qualitative analyses to show the benefits of explanations brought by the modeling of multiple item relations