A Neural User Preference Modeling Framework for Recommendation Based on Knowledge Graph

Abstract

To address the data sparsity and cold start problems in the traditional recommender systems, lots of researchers aim at incorporating knowledge graphs (KG) into recommender systems to enhance the recommendation performance. However, existing efforts mainly rely on hand-engineered features from KG (e.g., meta paths), which requires domain knowledge. What’s more, as relations are usually excluded from meta paths, they hardly specify the holistic semantics of paths. To address the limitations of existing methods, we propose an end-to-end neural user preference modeling framework (UPM) to incorporate features of entity and relation of KG into the representations of users and items, so as to learn user latent interests precisely. Specifically, UPM first propagate user’s interests along links between entities in KG iteratively to learn user’s potential preferences for the item. Furthermore, these preference features are dynamically during the preference propagation process. That is to say, the importance of these preference features to characterize user is different. Therefore, an attention network is used in UPM to calculate the influence of preference features at different propagating stages, then the final preference vector of the user is calculated from the preference features and the corresponding weights. Lastly, the final prediction probability of user-item interaction is obtained by inner product operation between the embedding of item and user. To evaluate our framework, extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.