Plot-aware transformer for recommender systems

Abstract

Plot text is very valuable supporting information in movie recommendations. It has several characteristics: 1) It is rich in content. Each movie often has a document of more than 200 words to describe it, which can give the movie a rich semantic meaning. 2) Objectivity. Plot texts are different from review information. A movie may have thousands of reviews with mixed and conflicting opinions. However, a film has only one plot text, which is fair in tone and does not take a position. Despite its appealing properties and potential for accurate movie portrayal, the lack of a building block for effectively mining plot semantics has led to the marginalization of plot text in the design of movie recommendation algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the application of the Transformer, currently the best natural language processing module, to learning movie plot texts to help achieve more accurate rating prediction. We propose the “Plot-Aware Transformer” model (PAT) to model the process of “user-movie” rating interaction. We test the PAT model on several movie datasets and demonstrated that the model is competitive. In all tasks, PAT achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to baseline experiments.