Keywords Generation Improves E-Commerce Session-based Recommendation

By exploring fine-grained user behaviors, session-based recommendation predicts a user’s next action from short-term behavior sessions. Most of previous work learns about a user’s implicit behavior by merely taking the last click action as the supervision signal. However, in e-commerce scenarios, large-scale products with elusive click behaviors make such task challenging because of the low inclusiveness problem, i.e., many relevant products that satisfy the user’s shopping intention are neglected by recommenders. Since similar products with different IDs may share the same intention, we argue that the textual information (e.g., keywords of product titles) from sessions can be used as additional supervision signals to tackle above problem through learning more shared intention within similar products. Therefore, to improve the performance of e-commerce session-based recommendation, we explicitly infer the user’s intention by generating keywords entirely from the click sequence in the current session. In this paper, we propose the e-commerce session-based recommendation model with keywords generation (abbreviated as ESRM-KG) to integrate keywords generation into e-commerce session-based recommendation. Specifically, the ESRM-KG model firstly encodes an input action sequence into a high dimensional representation; then it presents a bi-linear decoding scheme to predict the next action in the current session; synchronously, the ESRM-KG model addresses incepts the high dimensional representation of its encoder to generate explainable keywords for the whole session. We carried out extensive experiments in the context of click prediction on a large-scale real-world e-commerce dataset. Our experimental results show that the ESRM-KG model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with the help of keywords generation.