Asymmetrically Hierarchical Networks with Attentive Interactions for Interpretable Review-based Recommendation

Publication Date: 2/12/2020

Event: The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020)

Reference: pp. 1-8, 2020

Authors: Xin Dong, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Rutgers University; Jingchao Ni, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Wei Cheng, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Zhengzhang Chen, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Bo Zong, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Dongjin Song, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Yanchi Liu, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Haifeng Chen, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Gerard de Melo, Rutgers University

Abstract: Recently, recommender systems have been able to emit substantially improved recommendations by leveraging user-provided reviews. Existing methods typically merge all reviews of a given user (item) into a long document, and then process user and item documents in the same manner. In practice, however, these two sets of reviews are notably different: users’ reviews reflect a variety of items that they have bought and are hence very heterogeneous in their topics, while an item’s reviews pertain only to that single item and are thus topically homogeneous. In this work, we develop a novel neural network model that properly accounts for this important difference by means of asymmetric attentive modules. The user module learns to attend to only those signals that are relevant with respect to the target item, whereas the item module learns to extract the most salient contents with regard to properties of the item. Our multi-hierarchical paradigm accounts for the fact that neither are all reviews equally useful, nor are all sentences within each review equally pertinent. Extensive experimental results on a variety of real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Publication Link: https://aaai.org/papers/07667-asymmetrical-hierarchical-networks-with-attentive-interactions-for-interpretable-review-based-recommendation/