An enhanced attentive implicit relation embedding for social recommendation

Abstract

Nowadays, recommendation system incorporating social networks has attracted a lot of research attention and is widely used to understand user preferences regarding social relations. Besides, graph neural networks(GNNs) have proven to learn graph-structured data effectively. Thus, integrating GNN into social recommendations has become one challenge. Many approaches encode both the user–item interaction and social relations to learn user preference. However, implicit relations are also crucial to understanding the features of users and items. Thus, we propose the attentive implicit relation embedding for social recommendation(SR-AIR), which models the user–item interaction and social networks, utilizing a graph attention mechanism on implicit relations of users and items. We evaluate our framework on two real-world datasets and demonstrate that our framework performs the best compared with state-of-the-art baselines.