CATA++: A Collaborative Dual Attentive Autoencoder Method for Recommending Scientific Articles

Abstract

Recommender systems today have become an essential component of any commercial website. Collaborative filtering approaches, and Matrix Factorization (MF) techniques in particular, are widely used in recommender systems. However, the natural data sparsity problem limits their performance where users generally interact with very few items in the system. Consequently, multiple hybrid models were proposed recently to optimize MF performance by incorporating additional contextual information in its learning process. Although these models improve the recommendation quality, there are two primary aspects for further improvements: (1) multiple models focus only on some portion of the available contextual information and neglect other portions; (2) learning the feature space of the side contextual information needs to be further enhanced. In this paper, we introduce a Collaborative Dual Attentive Autoencoder (CATA++) for recommending scientific articles. CATA++ utilizes an article's content and learns its latent space via two parallel autoencoders. We employ the attention mechanism to capture the most related parts of information in order to make more relevant recommendations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets have shown that our dual-way learning strategy has significantly improved the MF performance in comparison with other state-of-the-art MF-based models using various experimental evaluations. The source code of our methods is available at: https://github.com/jianlin-cheng/CATA.