M2GNN: Metapath and Multi-interest Aggregated Graph Neural Network for Tag-based Cross-domain Recommendation

Abstract: Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) is an effective way to alleviate the data sparsity problem. Content-based CDR is one of the most promising branches since most kinds of products can be described by a piece of text, especially when cold-start users or items have few interactions. However, two vital issues are still under-explored: (1) From the content modeling perspective, sufficient long-text descriptions are usually scarce in a real recommender system, more often the light-weight textual features, such as a few keywords or tags, are more accessible, which is improperly modeled by existing methods. (2) From the CDR perspective, not all inter-domain interests are helpful to infer intra-domain interests. Caused by domain-specific features, there are part of signals benefiting for recommendation in the source domain but harmful for that in the target domain. Therefore, how to distill useful interests is crucial. To tackle the above two problems, we propose a metapath and multi-interest aggregated graph neural network (M2GNN). Specifically, to model the tag-based contents, we construct a heterogeneous information network to hold the semantic relatedness between users, items, and tags in all domains. The metapath schema is predefined according to domain-specific knowledge, with one metapath for one domain. User representations are learned by GNN with a hierarchical aggregation framework, where the intra-metapath aggregation firstly filters out trivial tags and the inter-metapath aggregation further filters out useless interests. Offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate that M2GNN achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods and current industrial recommender system in Dianping, respectively. Further analysis shows that M2GNN offers an interpretable recommendation.