Translation-based Recommendation: A Scalable Method for Modeling Sequential Behavior

Translation-based Recommendation: A Scalable Method for Modeling Sequential Behavior

Ruining He, Wang-Cheng Kang, Julian McAuley

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Best Sister Conferences. Pages 5264-5268. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/734

Modeling the complex interactions between users and items is at the core of designing successful recommender systems. One key task consists of predicting users’ personalized sequential behavior, where the challenge mainly lies in modeling ‘third-order’ interactions between a user, her previously visited item(s), and the next item to consume. In this paper, we propose a unified method, TransRec, to model such interactions for largescale sequential prediction. Methodologically, we embed items into a ‘transition space’ where users are modeled as translation vectors operating on item sequences. Empirically, this approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on a wide spectrum of real-world datasets.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Recommender Systems
Humans and AI: Personalization and User Modeling