User Profiling Based Deep Neural Network for Temporal News Recommendation
Vaibhav Kumar, Dhruv Khattar, Shashank Gupta, Manish Gupta, Vasudeva Varma · 2017
One of the most important and challenging problems in recommendation systems is that of modeling temporal behavior. Typically, modeling temporal behavior increases the cost of parameter inference and estimation. Along with it, it also poses the constraint of requiring a large amount of data for reliably learning the parameters of the model. Therefore, it is often difficult to model temporal behavior in large-scale real-world recommendation systems. In this work, we propose a deep neural network architecture which is based on a two level approach. We first generate document embeddings for every news article. We then use these embeddings and the previously read articles by a user to come up with her user profile. We then use this profile along with adequate positive and negative samples in order to train our model. The resulting model is then applied to a real-world data set. We compare it with a set of established baselines and the experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art. We also use the learned model to recommend articles to users who have had very little interaction with items, i.e., have read a very less amount of news articles. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of our model to solve the problem of item cold-start.