Knowledge-enhanced graph neural networks for sequential recommendation

Abstract

With the rapid increase in the popularity of big data and internet technology, sequential recommendation has become an important method to help people find items they are potentially interested in. Traditional recommendation methods use only recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to process sequential data. Although effective, the results may be unable to capture both the semantic-based preference and the complex transitions between items adequately. In this paper, we model separated session sequences into session graphs and capture complex transitions using graph neural networks (GNNs). We further link items in interaction sequences with existing external knowledge base (KB) entities and integrate the GNN-based recommender with key-value memory networks (KV-MNs) to incorporate KB knowledge. Specifically, we set a key matrix to many relation embeddings that learned from KB, corresponding to many entity attributes, and set up a set of value matrices storing the semantic-based preferences of different users for the corresponding attribute. By using a hybrid of a GNN and KV-MN, each session is represented as the combination of the current interest (i.e., sequential preference) and the global preference (i.e., semantic-based preference) of that session. Extensive experiments on three public real-world datasets show that our method performs better than baseline algorithms consistently.