SMEF: Social-aware Multi-dimensional Edge Features-based Graph Representation Learning for Recommendation

Abstract

Exploring user-item interaction cues is crucial for the performance of recommender systems. Explicit investigation of interaction cues is made possible by using graph-based models, where each user-item relationship is described by an edge, and the introduction of user-user social network. While existing graph-based recommendation methods use only a single-value edge to define the relationship between a pair of user and item, which limits the ability to represent complex user-item interactions. Furthermore, some social recommendation methods overlook the heterogeneous user behavior patterns in social and interaction relationships, resulting in the suboptimal performance of existing systems. In this paper, we propose a novel Social-aware Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based Graph Representation Learning method, called SMEF. It represents all users and items as a graph and deep learns a multi-dimensional edge feature to explicitly describe the task-specific relationships of each user-item pair. Specifically, the proposed SMEF focuses on two distinct user behavior patterns toward social friends and interactive items, which explore the underlying heterogeneous relationship cues within them. This way, the learned multi-dimensional edge features encode user information from both social and interaction aspects. The proposed SMEF is a plug-and-play module that can be combined with different recommendation frameworks and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) backbones to generate high quality user representations. The experimental results achieved on three publicly accessible datasets show that our SMEF-based method outperforms strong baselines.