Sentiment-guided Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

The existing sequential recommendation methods focus on modeling the temporal relationships of user behaviors and are good at using additional item information to improve performance. However, these methods rarely consider the influences of users' sequential subjective sentiments on their behaviors---and sometimes the temporal changes in human sentiment patterns plays a decisive role in users' final preferences. To investigate the influence of temporal sentiments on user preferences, we propose generating preferences by guiding user behavior through sequential sentiments. Specifically, we design a dual-channel fusion mechanism. The main channel consists of sentiment-guided attention to match and guide sequential user behavior, and the secondary channel consists of sparse sentiment attention to assist in preference generation. In the experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these two sentiment modeling mechanisms through ablation studies. Our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods that incorporate sentiment factors.