Adaptive hierarchical attention-enhanced gated network integrating reviews for item recommendation

Many studies focusing on integrating reviews with ratings to improve recommendation performance have been quite successful. However, these works still face several shortcomings: (1) The importance of dynamically integrating review and interaction data features is typically ignored, yet treating these fusion features equally may lead to an incomplete understanding of user preferences. (2) Some forms of soft attention methods are adopted to model the local semantic information of words. As features thus captured may contain irrelevant information, the generated attention map is neither discriminatory nor detailed. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Hierarchical Attention-enhanced Gated network integrating reviews for item recommendation, named AHAG. AHAG is a unified framework to capture the hidden intentions of users by adaptively incorporating reviews. Specifically, we design a gated network to dynamically fuse the extracted features and select the features that are most relevant to user preferences. To capture distinguishing fine-grained features, we introduce a hierarchical attention mechanism to learn important semantic information features and the dynamic interaction of these features. Besides, the high-order non-linear interaction of neural factorization machines is utilized to derive the rating prediction. Experiments on seven real-world datasets show that the proposed AHAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the attention mechanism can highlight the relevant information in reviews to increase the interpretability of the recommendation task. Source codes are available in https://github.com/luojia527/AHAG.