Deeply Fusing Reviews and Contents for Cold Start Users in Cross-Domain Recommendation Systems

Abstract

As one promising way to solve the challenging issues of data sparsity and cold start in recommender systems, crossdomain recommendation has gained increasing research interest recently. Cross-domain recommendation aims to improve the recommendation performance by means of transferring explicit or implicit feedback from the auxiliary domain to the target domain. Although the side information of review texts and item contents has been proven to be useful in recommendation, most existing works only use one kind of side information and cannot deeply fuse this side information with ratings. In this paper, we propose a Review and Content based Deep Fusion Model named RC-DFM for crossdomain recommendation. We first extend Stacked Denoising Autoencoders (SDAE) to effectively fuse review texts and item contents with the rating matrix in both auxiliary and target domains. Through this way, the learned latent factors of users and items in both domains preserve more semantic information for recommendation. Then we utilize a multi-layer perceptron to transfer user latent factors between the two domains to address the data sparsity and cold start issues. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate the superior performance of RC-DFM compared with state-of-the-art recommendation methods.

Deeply Fusing Reviews and Contents for Cold Start Users in Cross-Domain Recommendation Systems