Multi-Domain Recommendation to Attract Users via Domain Preference Modeling

Abstract

Recently, web platforms are operating various service domains simultaneously. Targeting a platform that operates multiple service domains, we introduce a new task, Multi-Domain Recommendation to Attract Users (MDRAU), which recommends items from multiple “unseen” domains with which each user has not interacted yet, by using knowledge from the user's “seen” domains. In this paper, we point out two challenges of MDRAU task. First, there are numerous possible combinations of mappings from seen to unseen domains because users have usually interacted with a different subset of service domains. Second, a user might have different preference for each of the target unseen domains, which requires recommendations to reflect users' preference on domains as well as items. To tackle these challenges, we propose DRIP framework that models users' preference at two levels (i.e., domain and item) and learns various seen-unseen domain mappings in a unified way with masked domain modeling. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DRIP in MDRAU task and its ability to capture users' domain-level preferences.