Auto-Encoding User Ratings via Knowledge Graphs in Recommendation Scenarios
This work addresses cold-start issues in recommender systems, offering a domain-specific improvement that is incremental by building on existing autoencoder and knowledge graph techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of cold-start users in recommendation systems by proposing SEM-AUTO, a method that uses knowledge graphs to encode semantic information into neural networks, achieving improved performance over BPRSLIM on the Movielens 1M dataset with few user ratings.
In the last decade, driven also by the availability of an unprecedented computational power and storage capabilities in cloud environments we assisted to the proliferation of new algorithms, methods, and approaches in two areas of artificial intelligence: knowledge representation and machine learning. On the one side, the generation of a high rate of structured data on the Web led to the creation and publication of the so-called knowledge graphs. On the other side, deep learning emerged as one of the most promising approaches in the generation and training of models that can be applied to a wide variety of application fields. More recently, autoencoders have proven their strength in various scenarios, playing a fundamental role in unsupervised learning. In this paper, we instigate how to exploit the semantic information encoded in a knowledge graph to build connections between units in a Neural Network, thus leading to a new method, SEM-AUTO, to extract and weigh semantic features that can eventually be used to build a recommender system. As adding content-based side information may mitigate the cold user problems, we tested how our approach behave in the presence of a few rating from a user on the Movielens 1M dataset and compare results with BPRSLIM.