Ask the GRU: Multi-Task Learning for Deep Text Recommendations

In a variety of application domains the content to be recommended to users is associated with text. This includes research papers, movies with associated plot summaries, news articles, blog posts, etc. Recommendation approaches based on latent factor models can be extended naturally to leverage text by employing an explicit mapping from text to factors. This enables recommendations for new, unseen content, and may generalize better, since the factors for all items are produced by a compactly-parametrized model. Previous work has used topic models or averages of word embeddings for this mapping. In this paper we present a method leveraging deep recurrent neural networks to encode the text sequence into a latent vector, specifically gated recurrent units (GRUs) trained end-to-end on the collaborative filtering task. For the task of scientific paper recommendation, this yields models with significantly higher accuracy. In cold-start scenarios, we beat the previous state-of-the-art, all of which ignore word order. Performance is further improved by multi-task learning, where the text encoder network is trained for a combination of content recommendation and item metadata prediction. This regularizes the collaborative filtering model, ameliorating the problem of sparsity of the observed rating matrix.Comment: 8 page

Deep Learning based Recommender System: A Survey and New Perspectives

With the ever-growing volume of online information, recommender systems have been an effective strategy to overcome such information overload. The utility of recommender systems cannot be overstated, given its widespread adoption in many web applications, along with its potential impact to ameliorate many problems related to over-choice. In recent years, deep learning has garnered considerable interest in many research fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, owing not only to stellar performance but also the attractive property of learning feature representations from scratch. The influence of deep learning is also pervasive, recently demonstrating its effectiveness when applied to information retrieval and recommender systems research. Evidently, the field of deep learning in recommender system is flourishing. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems. More concretely, we provide and devise a taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models, along with providing a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to this new exciting development of the field.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/328502

Deep Learning based Recommendation Systems

The usage of Internet applications, such as social networking and e-commerce is increasing exponentially, which leads to an increased offered content. Recommender systems help users filter out relevant content from a large pool of available content. The recommender systems play a vital role in today’s internet applications. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the popular technique used to design recommendation systems. This technique recommends new content to users based on preferences that the user and similar users have. However, there are some shortcomings to current CF techniques, which affects negatively the performance of the recommendation models. In recent years, deep learning has achieved great success in natural language processing, computer vision and speech recognition. However, the use of deep learning in recommendation domain is relatively new. In this work, we tackle the shortcomings of collaborative filtering by using deep neural network techniques. Although some recent work has employed deep learning for recommendation, they only focused on modeling content descriptions, such as content information of items and auricular features of audios. Moreover, these models ignore the important factor of collaborative filtering, that is the user-item interaction function, but some models still employ matrix factorization, by using inner product on the latent features of items and users. In this project, the inner product is replaced by a neural network architecture, which learns an user-item interaction function from data. To handle any nonlinearities in the user-item interaction function, a multi-layer perceptron is used. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate improvements made by our model compared to existing popular collaborative filtering techniques. Empirical evidence shows deep learning based recommendation models have better performance