Enhancing User Interest Modeling with Knowledge-Enriched Itemsets for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation which aims to predict a user's next interaction based on his/her previous behaviors, has attracted great attention. Recent studies mainly employ deep recurrent neural networks or self-attention networks to capture dynamic user preferences. However, existing methods merely focus on modeling users' clear interests in interacted items. We argue that for an interaction, the user may also have ambiguous interests in items that are semantically related to the interacted one. For comprehensively capturing user preferences, it is beneficial to discover potential interests from historical interactions at a broader itemset level. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a knowledge graph enhanced sequential recommendation model namely KGIE, which focuses on enhancing user interest modeling with knowledge-enriched itemsets by incorporating the knowledge graph. Specifically, in addition to item-level interest modeling with interacted items, we further construct knowledge-enriched itemsets that are extracted via high-order knowledge associations with the interacted items. For capturing personalized itemset-level interests, we design an attentive aggregation unit to combine item embeddings considering both inherent and contextual personalization signals. Furthermore, to balance the contributions of both two levels of interest modeling, we adaptively learn high-level preference representations with a gating fusion unit. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance beyond state-of-the-art methods and recommendation interpretability of our model.