Content recommendation with two-level TransE predictors and interaction-aware embedding enhancement: An information seeking behavior perspective

In community-based social media, users consume content from multiple communities and provide feedback. The community-related data reflect user interests, but they are poorly used as additional information to enrich user-content interaction for content recommendation in existing studies. This paper employs an information seeking behavior perspective to describe user content consumption behavior in community-based social media, therefore revealing the relations between user, community and content. Based on that, the paper proposes a Community-aware Information Seeking based Content Recommender (abbreviated as CISCRec) to use the relations for better modeling user preferences on content and increase the reasoning on the recommendation results. CISCRec includes two key components: a two-level TransE prediction framework and interaction-aware embedding enhancement. The two-level TransE prediction framework hierarchically models users’ preferences for content by considering community entities based on the TransE method. Interaction-aware embedding enhancement is designed based on the analysis of users’ continued engagement in online communities, aiming to add expressiveness to embeddings in the prediction framework. To verify the effectiveness of the model, the real-world Reddit dataset (4,868 users, 115,491 contents, 850 communities, and 602,025 interactions) is chosen for evaluation. The results show that CISCRec outperforms 8 common baselines by 9.33%, 4.71%, 42.13%, and 14.36% on average under the Precision, Recall, MRR, and NDCG respectively.