Empowering recommender systems using automatically generated Knowledge Graphs and Reinforcement Learning

Personalized recommendations have a growing importance in direct marketing, which motivates research to enhance customer experiences by knowledge graph (KG) applications. For example, in financial services, companies may benefit from providing relevant financial articles to their customers to cultivate relationships, foster client engagement and promote informed financial decisions. While several approaches center on KG-based recommender systems for improved content, in this study we focus on interpretable KG-based recommender systems for decision making.To this end, we present two knowledge graph-based approaches for personalized article recommendations for a set of customers of a large multinational financial services company. The first approach employs Reinforcement Learning and the second approach uses the XGBoost algorithm for recommending articles to the customers. Both approaches make use of a KG generated from both structured (tabular data) and unstructured data (a large body of text data).Using the Reinforcement Learning-based recommender system we could leverage the graph traversal path leading to the recommendation as a way to generate interpretations (Path Directed Reasoning (PDR)). In the XGBoost-based approach, one can also provide explainable results using post-hoc methods such as SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) and ELI5 (Explain Like I am Five).Importantly, our approach offers explainable results, promoting better decision-making. This study underscores the potential of combining advanced machine learning techniques with KG-driven insights to bolster experience in customer relationship management.Comment: Accepted at KDD (OARS) 2023 [https://oars-workshop.github.io/

Intent classification by the use of automatically generated knowledge graphs

Intent classification is an essential task for goal-oriented dialogue systems for automatically identifying customers¿ goals. Although intent classification performs well in general settings, domain-specific user goals can still present a challenge for this task. To address this challenge, we automatically generate knowledge graphs for targeted data sets to capture domain-specific knowledge and leverage embeddings trained on these knowledge graphs for the intent classification task. As existing knowledge graphs might not be suitable for a targeted domain of interest, our automatic generation of knowledge graphs can extract the semantic information of any domain, which can be incorporated within the classification process. We compare our results with state-of-the-art pre-trained sentence embeddings and our evaluation of three data sets shows improvement in the intent classification task in terms of precision.This publication has emanated from research supported in part by a grant from Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number SFI/12/RC/2289_P2. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.peer-reviewe