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Metric Learning for Session-Based Recommendations

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021)

Abstract

Session-based recommenders, used for making predictions out of users’ uninterrupted sequences of actions, are attractive for many applications. Here, for this task we propose using metric learning, where a common embedding space for sessions and items is created, and distance measures dissimilarity between the provided sequence of users’ events and the next action. We discuss and compare metric learning approaches to commonly used learning-to-rank methods, where some synergies exist. We propose a simple architecture for problem analysis and demonstrate that neither extensively big nor deep architectures are necessary in order to outperform existing methods. The experimental results against strong baselines on four datasets are provided with an ablation study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/btwardow/dml4rec.

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Acknowledgments and Disclosure of Funding

We acknowledge the support from Sales Intelligence and co-funding by European Regional Development Fund, project number: POIR.01.01.01-00-0632/18.

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Correspondence to Paweł Zawistowski .

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Twardowski, B., Zawistowski, P., Zaborowski, S. (2021). Metric Learning for Session-Based Recommendations. In: Hiemstra, D., Moens, MF., Mothe, J., Perego, R., Potthast, M., Sebastiani, F. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12656. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72113-8_43

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72113-8_43

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