Speaker: Liu Yong, Senior Research Scientist, Nanyang Technological University

Date: Aug. 8, 2021

Time: 15:00-16:00

Location: Tencent Meeting, ID: 639 557 845

Sponsor: School of Software, Shandong University

Abstract:

Side information of items, e.g., images and text description, has shown to be effective in contributing to accurate recommendations. Inspired by the recent success of pre-training models on natural language and images, we propose a pre-training strategy to learn item representations by considering both item side information and their relationships. We relate items by common user activities, e.g., co-purchase, and construct a homogeneous item graph. This graph provides a unified view of item relations and their associated side information in multimodality. We develop a novel sampling algorithm named MCNSampling to select contextual neighbours for each item. The proposed Pre-trained Multimodal Graph Transformer (PMGT) learns item representations with two objectives: 1) graph structure reconstruction and 2) masked node feature reconstruction. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed PMGT model effectively exploits the multimodality side information to achieve better accuracies in downstream tasks including item recommendation and click- through ratio prediction. In addition, we also report case study of testing PMGT in an online setting with 600 thousand users.

Bio:

Dr. Yong Liu is a Senior Research Scientist at Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute and Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore Prior to joining NTU, he was a Data Scientist at NTUC Enterprise, Singapore from Nov. 2017 to July 2018 and a Research Scientist at Institute for Infocomm Research (2R. A"STAR, Singapore from Nov. 2015 to Oct 2017. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from NTU in 2016 and B.S. degree in Electronic Science and Technology from University of Science and Technology of China in 2008. His research interests include recommender systems, natural language processing, and bioinformatics. He has been invited as a PC member of major conferences such as KDD, SIGIR, ACL, IJCAI, AAAI, and reviewer for IEEE/ACM transactions.

For more information, please visit:

https://www.view.sdu.edu.cn/info/1020/155329.htm