User Recommendation in Content Curation Platforms

Abstract

We propose a personalized user recommendation framework for content curation platforms that models preferences for both users and the items they engage with simultaneously. In this way, user preferences for specific item types (e.g., fantasy novels) can be balanced with user specialties (e.g., reviewing novels with strong female protagonists). In particular, the proposed model has three unique characteristics: (i) it simultaneously learns both user-item and user-user preferences through a multi-aspect autoencoder model; (ii) it fuses the latent representations of user preferences on users and items to construct shared factors through an adversarial framework; and (iii) it incorporates an attention layer to produce weighted aggregations of different latent representations, leading to improved personalized recommendation of users and items. Through experiments against state-of-the-art models, we find the proposed framework leads to a 18.43% (Goodreads) and 6.14% (Spotify) improvement in top-k user recommendation.