Exploring implicit influence for social recommendation based on GNN

Abstract

In recent years, the method of using graph neural networks (GNN) to learn users’ social influence has been widely applied to social recommendation and has shown effectiveness, but several important challenges have not been well addressed: (i) Most work fails to consider the user interests (historical user-item interactions) when first building user-user social relationships, which can make it difficult to capture accurate user embedding and thus prevent the model from better exploring the users’ social influence; (ii) Most of the current methods do not build social neighbors (with the same item-user interaction) that belong to the item and do not aggregate information from the perspective of social neighbors, which makes it possible for the item to lose a lot of details when expressing the user’s interest factors. Therefore, to address the above challenges, we propose Exploring Implicit Influence for Social Recommendation Based on GNN (EIIGNN). First, we construct the initial user embedding with user-item interaction information and use the implicit modeling module in user modeling to explore the implicit influence of interest factors on users. In addition, EIIGNN models the social graph structure of item (an item-item graph) so that item can aggregate information from the perspective of their social neighbors, which helps the model learn a more accurate representation of the item. Finally, extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of EIIGNN.