Auxiliary Information-Enhanced Recommendations

Sequential recommendations have attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry in recent years. They predict a given user’s next choice of items by mainly modeling the sequential relations over a sequence of the user’s interactions with the items. However, most of the existing sequential recommendation algorithms mainly focus on the sequential dependencies between item IDs within sequences, while ignoring the rich and complex relations embedded in the auxiliary information, such as items’ image information and textual information. Such complex relations can help us better understand users’ preferences towards items, and thus benefit from the recommendations. To bridge this gap, we propose an auxiliary information-enhanced sequential recommendation algorithm called memory fusion network for recommendation (MFN4Rec) to incorporate both items’ image and textual information for sequential recommendations. Accordingly, item IDs, item image information and item textual information are regarded as three modalities. By comprehensively modelling the sequential relations within modalities and interaction relations across modalities, MFN4Rec can learn a more informative representation of users’ preferences for more accurate recommendations. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MFN4Rec over state-of-the-art sequential recommendation algorithms.