Granular intents learning via mutual information maximization for knowledge-aware recommendation

Knowledge-aware recommender systems, which utilize knowledge graphs (KGs) to enrich item information, have been shown to improve the accuracy and explainability of recommendations. Besides, KGs are further explored to determine the intent of choosing items (i.e., the reason why users select items of interest). Conventional methods represent intents either as sets of relations in a KG or as KG entities. However, such approaches fail to fully leverage the combined information provided by both entities and relations. To address this issue, we propose a new KG-based user Intent Extraction Framework (KIEF) to capture user intents at a more fine-grained level for recommendation. Specifically, we propose a novel intent representation constructed with relation-aware entity representation, encouraging finer granularity for user intents. Furthermore, since a KG may contain noisy information that impairs the quality of user intent, it is compulsory to consider which factors in a KG are important to represent a user’s intent. Thus, we introduce global intent which are comprehensive features for the entire interactions of all users and local intent, which are empirical features of individual users from personal history. By maximizing mutual information between global and local intents, KIEF captures user preference for items. Through extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets, we prove the superior performance of KIEF over the state-of-the-art and analyze interpretable explanations for understanding user intents.