LkeRec: Toward Lightweight End-to-End Joint Representation Learning for Building Accurate and Effective Recommendation

Explicit and implicit knowledge about users and items have been used to describe complex and heterogeneous side information for recommender systems (RSs). Many existing methods use knowledge graph embedding (KGE) to learn the representation of a user-item knowledge graph (KG) in low-dimensional space. In this article, we propose a lightweight end-to-end joint learning framework for fusing the tasks of KGE and RSs at the model level. Our method proposes a lightweight KG embedding method by using bidirectional bijection relation-type modeling to enable scalability for large graphs while using self-adaptive negative sampling to optimize negative sample generating. Our method further generates the integrated views for users and items based on relation-types to explicitly model users’ preferences and items’ features, respectively. Finally, we add virtual “recommendation” relations between the integrated views of users and items to model the preferences of users on items, seamlessly integrating RS with user-item KG over a unified graph. Experimental results on multiple datasets and benchmarks show that our method can achieve a better accuracy of recommendation compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. Complexity and runtime analysis suggests that our method can gain a lower time and space complexity than most of existing methods and improve scalability.