6.3IRNov 1, 2021
Improving Location Recommendation with Urban Knowledge GraphChang Liu, Chen Gao, Depeng Jin et al.
Location recommendation is defined as to recommend locations (POIs) to users in location-based services. The existing data-driving approaches of location recommendation suffer from the limitation of the implicit modeling of the geographical factor, which may lead to sub-optimal recommendation results. In this work, we address this problem by introducing knowledge-driven solutions. Specifically, we first construct the Urban Knowledge Graph (UrbanKG) with geographical information and functional information of POIs. On the other side, there exist a fact that the geographical factor not only characterizes POIs but also affects user-POI interactions. To address it, we propose a novel method named UKGC. We first conduct information propagation on two sub-graphs to learn the representations of POIs and users. We then fuse two parts of representations by counterfactual learning for the final prediction. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets verify that our method can outperform the state-of-the-art methods.
Disentangling User Interest and Conformity for Recommendation with Causal EmbeddingYu Zheng, Chen Gao, Xiang Li et al.
Recommendation models are usually trained on observational interaction data. However, observational interaction data could result from users' conformity towards popular items, which entangles users' real interest. Existing methods tracks this problem as eliminating popularity bias, e.g., by re-weighting training samples or leveraging a small fraction of unbiased data. However, the variety of user conformity is ignored by these approaches, and different causes of an interaction are bundled together as unified representations, hence robustness and interpretability are not guaranteed when underlying causes are changing. In this paper, we present DICE, a general framework that learns representations where interest and conformity are structurally disentangled, and various backbone recommendation models could be smoothly integrated. We assign users and items with separate embeddings for interest and conformity, and make each embedding capture only one cause by training with cause-specific data which is obtained according to the colliding effect of causal inference. Our proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with remarkable improvements on two real-world datasets on top of various backbone models. We further demonstrate that the learned embeddings successfully capture the desired causes, and show that DICE guarantees the robustness and interpretability of recommendation.