No Arabic abstract
Recently, conversational recommender system (CRS) has become an emerging and practical research topic. Most of the existing CRS methods focus on learning effective preference representations for users from conversation data alone. While, we take a new perspective to leverage historical interaction data for improving CRS. For this purpose, we propose a novel pre-training approach to integrating both item-based preference sequence (from historical interaction data) and attribute-based preference sequence (from conversation data) via pre-training methods. We carefully design two pre-training tasks to enhance information fusion between item- and attribute-based preference. To improve the learning performance, we further develop an effective negative sample generator which can produce high-quality negative samples. Experiment results on two real-world datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach for improving CRS.
Recently, dense passage retrieval has become a mainstream approach to finding relevant information in various natural language processing tasks. A number of studies have been devoted to improving the widely adopted dual-encoder architecture. However, most of the previous studies only consider query-centric similarity relation when learning the dual-encoder retriever. In order to capture more comprehensive similarity relations, we propose a novel approach that leverages both query-centric and PAssage-centric sImilarity Relations (called PAIR) for dense passage retrieval. To implement our approach, we make three major technical contributions by introducing formal formulations of the two kinds of similarity relations, generating high-quality pseudo labeled data via knowledge distillation, and designing an effective two-stage training procedure that incorporates passage-centric similarity relation constraint. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions datasets.
Recently, a new form of online shopping becomes more and more popular, which combines live streaming with E-Commerce activity. The streamers introduce products and interact with their audiences, and hence greatly improve the performance of selling products. Despite of the successful applications in industries, the live stream E-commerce has not been well studied in the data science community. To fill this gap, we investigate this brand-new scenario and collect a real-world Live Stream E-Commerce (LSEC) dataset. Different from conventional E-commerce activities, the streamers play a pivotal role in the LSEC events. Hence, the key is to make full use of rich interaction information among streamers, users, and products. We first conduct data analysis on the tripartite interaction data and quantify the streamers influence on users purchase behavior. Based on the analysis results, we model the tripartite information as a heterogeneous graph, which can be decomposed to multiple bipartite graphs in order to better capture the influence. We propose a novel Live Stream E-Commerce Graph Neural Network framework (LSEC-GNN) to learn the node representations of each bipartite graph, and further design a multi-task learning approach to improve product recommendation. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets with different scales show that our method can significantly outperform various baseline approaches.
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) in E-commerce platforms aim to recommend items to users via multiple conversational interactions. Click-through rate (CTR) prediction models are commonly used for ranking candidate items. However, most CRSs are suffer from the problem of data scarcity and sparseness. To address this issue, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced deep cross network (K-DCN), a two-step (pretrain and fine-tune) CTR prediction model to recommend items. We first construct a billion-scale conversation knowledge graph (CKG) from information about users, items and conversations, and then pretrain CKG by introducing knowledge graph embedding method and graph convolution network to encode semantic and structural information respectively.To make the CTR prediction model sensible of current state of users and the relationship between dialogues and items, we introduce user-state and dialogue-interaction representations based on pre-trained CKG and propose K-DCN.In K-DCN, we fuse the user-state representation, dialogue-interaction representation and other normal feature representations via deep cross network, which will give the rank of candidate items to be recommended.We experimentally prove that our proposal significantly outperforms baselines and show its real application in Alime.
Classical recommender system methods typically face the filter bubble problem when users only receive recommendations of their familiar items, making them bored and dissatisfied. To address the filter bubble problem, unexpected recommendations have been proposed to recommend items significantly deviating from users prior expectations and thus surprising them by presenting fresh and previously unexplored items to the users. In this paper, we describe a novel Personalized Unexpected Recommender System (PURS) model that incorporates unexpectedness into the recommendation process by providing multi-cluster modeling of user interests in the latent space and personalized unexpectedness via the self-attention mechanism and via selection of an appropriate unexpected activation function. Extensive offline experiments on three real-world datasets illustrate that the proposed PURS model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline approaches in terms of both accuracy and unexpectedness measures. In addition, we conduct an online A/B test at a major video platform Alibaba-Youku, where our model achieves over 3% increase in the average video view per user metric. The proposed model is in the process of being deployed by the company.
This paper advocates privacy preserving requirements on collection of user data for recommender systems. The purpose of our study is twofold. First, we ask if restrictions on data collection will hurt test quality of RNN-based recommendations. We study how validation performance depends on the available amount of training data. We use a combination of top-K accuracy, catalog coverage and novelty for this purpose, since good recommendations for the user is not necessarily captured by a traditional accuracy metric. Second, we ask if we can improve the quality under minimal data by using secondary data sources. We propose knowledge transfer for this purpose and construct a representation to measure similarities between purchase behaviour in data. This to make qualified judgements of which source domain will contribute the most. Our results show that (i) there is a saturation in test performance when training size is increased above a critical point. We also discuss the interplay between different performance metrics, and properties of data. Moreover, we demonstrate that (ii) our representation is meaningful for measuring purchase behaviour. In particular, results show that we can leverage secondary data to improve validation performance if we select a relevant source domain according to our similarly measure.