Neighborhood Attentional Memory Networks for Recommendation Systems

Deep learning systems have been phenomenally successful in the fields of computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Recently, researchers have adopted deep learning techniques to tackle collaborative filtering with implicit feedback. However, the existing methods generally profile both users and items directly, while neglecting the similarities between users’ and items’ neighborhoods. To this end, we propose the neighborhood attentional memory networks (NAMN), a deep learning recommendation model applying two dedicated memory networks to capture users’ neighborhood relations and items’ neighborhood relations respectively. Specifically, we first design the user neighborhood component and the item neighborhood component based on memory networks and attention mechanisms. Then, by the associative addressing scheme with the user and item memories in the neighborhood components, we capture the complex user-item neighborhood relations. Stacking multiple memory modules together yields deeper architectures exploring higher-order complex user-item neighborhood relations. Finally, the output module jointly exploits the user and item neighborhood information with the user and item memories to obtain the ranking score. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate significant improvements of the proposed NAMN method over the state-of-the-art methods.