Multi-Sequence Attentive User Representation Learning for Side-information Integrated Sequential Recommendation

Side-information integrated sequential recommendation incorporates supplementary information to alleviate the issue of data sparsity. The state-of-the-art works mainly leverage some side information to improve the attention calculation to learn user representation more accurately. However, there are still some limitations to be addressed in this topic. Most of them merely learn the user representation at the item level and overlook the association of the item sequence and the side-information sequences when calculating the attentions, which results in the incomprehensive learning of user representation. Some of them learn the user representations at both the item and side-information levels, but they still face the problem of insufficient optimization of multiple user representations. To address these limitations, we propose a novel model, i.e., Multi-Sequence Sequential Recommender (MSSR), which learns the user's multiple representations from diverse sequences. Specifically, we design a multi-sequence integrated attention layer to learn more attentive pairs than the existing works and adaptively fuse these pairs to learn user representation. Moreover, our user representation alignment module constructs the self-supervised signals to optimize the representations. Subsequently, they are further refined by our side information predictor during training. For item prediction, our MSSR extra considers the side information of the candidate item, enabling a comprehensive measurement of the user's preferences. Extensive experiments on four public datasets show that our MSSR outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines. Visualization and case study also demonstrate the rationality and interpretability of our MSSR.