BeLightRec: A lightweight recommender system enhanced with BERT

The trend of data mining using deep learning models on graph neural networks has proven effective in identifying object features through signal encoders and decoders, particularly in recommendation systems utilizing collaborative filtering methods. Collaborative filtering exploits similarities between users and items from historical data. However, it overlooks distinctive information, such as item names and descriptions. The semantic data of items should be further mined using models in the natural language processing field. Thus, items can be compared using text classification, similarity assessments, or identifying analogous sentence pairs. This research proposes combining two sources of item similarity signals: one from collaborative filtering and one from the semantic similarity measure between item names and descriptions. These signals are integrated into a graph convolutional neural network to optimize model weights, thereby providing accurate recommendations. Experiments are also designed to evaluate the contribution of each signal group to the recommendation results.