Diarec: Dynamic Intention-Aware Recommendation with Attention-Based Context-Aware Item Attributes Modeling

Recommender systems (RSs) often focus on learning users’ long-term preferences, while the sequential pattern of behavior is ignored. On the other hand, sequential RSs try to predict the next action by exploring relations between items in a user’s last interactions but do not consider the general preference. Recently, the performance of RSs has increased by unifying these two types of paradigms. However, existing methods still have two limitations. First, the user’s behavior uncertainty impedes precise learning of preferences. Second, being unable to understand the semantics of items makes the effect of the same item considered in the same way. These limitations jointly prevent RS from learning multifaceted preferences to capture the actual intentions of users. Existing methods have not properly addressed these problems since they ignore context-aware interactions between the user and item in terms of the links between the user and item attributes and sequential user actions over time. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel model, called the Dynamic Intention-Aware Recommendation with attention-based context-aware item attributes modeling (DIARec), which is capable of determining users’ preferences based on their goal intention, taking into account the influence of various item features on user decision-making in their current context. Specifically, to model users’ dynamic intentions, we introduce a dynamic intent-aware module to represent the hierarchical relations between items and their attributes in a given session. Experiments on benchmark datasets indicate that the proposed model DIARec outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.