Transfer Meets Hybrid: A Synthetic Approach for Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering with Text
This work addresses the data sparsity issue in recommender systems for users by combining hybrid and transfer learning approaches, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackles the data sparsity problem in collaborative filtering for recommender systems by integrating both auxiliary text information and cross-domain knowledge transfer, resulting in improved performance on two real-world datasets as measured by three ranking metrics.
Collaborative filtering (CF) is the key technique for recommender systems (RSs). CF exploits user-item behavior interactions (e.g., clicks) only and hence suffers from the data sparsity issue. One research thread is to integrate auxiliary information such as product reviews and news titles, leading to hybrid filtering methods. Another thread is to transfer knowledge from other source domains such as improving the movie recommendation with the knowledge from the book domain, leading to transfer learning methods. In real-world life, no single service can satisfy a user's all information needs. Thus it motivates us to exploit both auxiliary and source information for RSs in this paper. We propose a novel neural model to smoothly enable Transfer Meeting Hybrid (TMH) methods for cross-domain recommendation with unstructured text in an end-to-end manner. TMH attentively extracts useful content from unstructured text via a memory module and selectively transfers knowledge from a source domain via a transfer network. On two real-world datasets, TMH shows better performance in terms of three ranking metrics by comparing with various baselines. We conduct thorough analyses to understand how the text content and transferred knowledge help the proposed model.