RecoBERT: A catalog language model for text-based recommendations

Itzik Malkiel, Oren Barkan, Avi Caciularu, Noam Razin, Ori Katz, Noam Koenigstein

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Language models that utilize extensive self-supervised pre-training from unlabeled text, have recently shown to significantly advance the state-of-the-art performance in a variety of language understanding tasks. However, it is yet unclear if and how these recent models can be harnessed for conducting text-based recommendations. In this work, we introduce RecoBERT, a BERT-based approach for learning catalog-specialized language models for text-based item recommendations. We suggest novel training and inference procedures for scoring similarities between pairs of items, that don’t require item similarity labels. Both the training and the inference techniques were designed to utilize the unlabeled structure of textual catalogs, and minimize the discrepancy between them. By incorporating four scores during inference, RecoBERT can infer text-based item-to-item similarities more accurately than other techniques. In addition, we introduce a new language understanding task for wine recommendations using similarities based on professional wine reviews. As an additional contribution, we publish annotated recommendations dataset crafted by human wine experts. Finally, we evaluate RecoBERT and compare it to various state-of-the-art NLP models on wine and fashion recommendations tasks.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Findings of ACL
Subtitle of host publicationEMNLP 2020
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1704-1714
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148903
StatePublished - 2020
EventFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020: EMNLP 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 16 Nov 202020 Nov 2020

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2020

Conference

ConferenceFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020: EMNLP 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period16/11/2020/11/20

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