Keywords-enhanced Contrastive Learning Model for travel recommendation

Travel recommendation aims to infer travel intentions of users by analyzing their historical behaviors on Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). However, crucial keywords in clicked travel product titles, such as destination and itinerary duration, indicating tourists’ intentions, are often overlooked. Additionally, most previous studies only consider stable long-term user interests or temporary short-term user preferences, making the recommendation performance unreliable. To mitigate these constraints, this paper proposes a novel Keywords-enhanced Contrastive Learning Model (KCLM). KCLM simultaneously implements personalized travel recommendation and keywords generation tasks, integrating long-term and short-term user preferences within both tasks. Furthermore, we design two kinds of contrastive learning tasks for better user and travel product representation learning. The preference contrastive learning aims to bridge the gap between long-term and short-term user preferences. The multi-view contrastive learning focuses on modeling the coarse-grained commonality between clicked products and their keywords. Extensive experiments are conducted on two tourism datasets and a large-scale e-commerce dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that KCLM achieves substantial gains in both metrics compared to the best-performing baseline methods. Specifically, HR@20 improved by 5.79%–14.13%, MRR@20 improved by 6.57%–18.50%. Furthermore, to have an intuitive understanding of the keyword generation by the KCLM model, we provide a case study for several randomized examples.