Collaborative Self-Attention Network for Session-based Recommendation

Collaborative Self-Attention Network for Session-based Recommendation

Anjing Luo, Pengpeng Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang, Jiajie Xu, Junhua Fang, Victor S. Sheng

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2591-2597. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/359

Session-based recommendation becomes a research hotspot for its ability to make recommendations for anonymous users. However, existing session-based methods have the following limitations: (1) They either lack the capability to learn complex dependencies or focus mostly on the current session without explicitly considering collaborative information. (2) They assume that the representation of an item is static and fixed for all users at each time step. We argue that even the same item can be represented differently for different users at the same time step. To this end, we propose a novel solution, Collaborative Self-Attention Network (CoSAN) for session-based recommendation, to learn the session representation and predict the intent of the current session by investigating neighborhood sessions. Specially, we first devise a collaborative item representation by aggregating the embedding of neighborhood sessions retrieved according to each item in the current session. Then, we apply self-attention to learn long-range dependencies between collaborative items and generate collaborative session representation. Finally, each session is represented by concatenating the collaborative session representation and the embedding of the current session. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that CoSAN constantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Recommender Systems
Machine Learning: Deep Learning: Sequence Modeling