Pivotal Role of Language Modeling in Recommender Systems: Enriching Task-specific and Task-agnostic Representation Learning

Kyuyong Shin, Hanock Kwak, Wonjae Kim, Jisu Jeong, Seungjae Jung, Kyungmin Kim, Jung-Woo Ha, Sang-Woo Lee


Abstract
Recent studies have proposed unified user modeling frameworks that leverage user behavior data from various applications. Many of them benefit from utilizing users’ behavior sequences as plain texts, representing rich information in any domain or system without losing generality. Hence, a question arises: Can language modeling for user history corpus help improve recommender systems? While its versatile usability has been widely investigated in many domains, its applications to recommender systems still remain underexplored. We show that language modeling applied directly to task-specific user histories achieves excellent results on diverse recommendation tasks. Also, leveraging additional task-agnostic user histories delivers significant performance benefits. We further demonstrate that our approach can provide promising transfer learning capabilities for a broad spectrum of real-world recommender systems, even on unseen domains and services.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1146–1161
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.64
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.64
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kyuyong Shin, Hanock Kwak, Wonjae Kim, Jisu Jeong, Seungjae Jung, Kyungmin Kim, Jung-Woo Ha, and Sang-Woo Lee. 2023. Pivotal Role of Language Modeling in Recommender Systems: Enriching Task-specific and Task-agnostic Representation Learning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1146–1161, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pivotal Role of Language Modeling in Recommender Systems: Enriching Task-specific and Task-agnostic Representation Learning (Shin et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.64.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.64.mp4