Collaborative Filtering with Attribution Alignment for Review-based Non-overlapped Cross Domain Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CFAA, a novel framework for review-based non-overlapped cross-domain recommendation that effectively combines review data with other information and reduces domain discrepancy, improving recommendation accuracy.

Contribution

The paper proposes CFAA, a new model that integrates review, ID, and ratings for expressive embeddings and employs attribution alignment to reduce domain differences in RNCDR.

Findings

CFAA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on Douban and Amazon datasets.

Effective combination of review, ID, and ratings enhances embedding quality.

Attribution alignment reduces domain discrepancy, improving recommendation performance.

Abstract

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been popularly studied to utilize different domain knowledge to solve the data sparsity and cold-start problem in recommender systems. In this paper, we focus on the Review-based Non-overlapped Recommendation (RNCDR) problem. The problem is commonly-existed and challenging due to two main aspects, i.e, there are only positive user-item ratings on the target domain and there is no overlapped user across different domains. Most previous CDR approaches cannot solve the RNCDR problem well, since (1) they cannot effectively combine review with other information (e.g., ID or ratings) to obtain expressive user or item embedding, (2) they cannot reduce the domain discrepancy on users and items. To fill this gap, we propose Collaborative Filtering with Attribution Alignment model (CFAA), a cross-domain recommendation framework for the RNCDR problem. CFAA includes two main modules, i.e., rating prediction module and embedding attribution alignment module. The former aims to jointly mine review, one-hot ID, and multi-hot historical ratings to generate expressive user and item embeddings. The later includes vertical attribution alignment and horizontal attribution alignment, tending to reduce the discrepancy based on multiple perspectives. Our empirical study on Douban and Amazon datasets demonstrates that CFAA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models under the RNCDR setting.