Paper Notes: Adaptive User Modeling with Long and Short-Term Preferences for Personalized Recommenda

Adaptive User Modeling with Long and Short-Term Preferences for Personalized Recommendation

• LINK: https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/585

• CLASSIFICATION: RECOMMENDER-SYSTEM, SEQUENTIAL RECOMMENDER, LONG SHORT INTEREST

• YEAR: Submitted on 24 May 2019

• FROM: IJCAI 2019

• WHAT PROBLEM TO SOLVE: Previous approaches neglect the importance of dynamically integrating long-term and short-term user modeling paradigms. Moreover, users’ behaviors are much more complex than sentences in language modeling or images in visual computing, thus the classical structures of RNN such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) need to be upgraded for better user modeling.

• SOLUTION: In this paper, we improve the traditional RNN structure by proposing a time-aware controller and a content-aware controller, so that contextual information can be well considered to control the state transition. We further propose an attention-based framework to combine users’ long-term and short-term preferences, thus users’ representation can be generated adaptively according to the specific context. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-art methods consistently.

• CORE POINT:

  • Two Key Problems

    1. Dynamic Time Intervals: Intuitively, two actions within a short time interval tend to share a closer relationship than two actions that within a long time interval. Thus this kind of temporal distance deserve special handling.
    2. Dynamic Latent Intent: Customer intent, also known as the user’s main purpose behind his/her behavior, is often changing from session to session. Irrelevant actions are useless for predicting a user’s certain future action.

  • Short-Term Modeling

    • Original LSTM

      

    • Time irregularity

      To tackle the problem of time irregularity, we modify the gati