Modeling the Past and Future Contexts for Session-based Recommendation

Long session-based recommender systems have attacted much attention recently. For each user, they may create hundreds of click behaviors in short time. To learn long session item dependencies, previous sequential recommendation models resort either to data augmentation or a left-to-right autoregressive training approach. While effective, an obvious drawback is that future user behaviors are always mising during training. In this paper, we claim that users' future action signals can be exploited to boost the recommendation quality. To model both past and future contexts, we investigate three ways of augmentation techniques from both data and model perspectives. Moreover, we carefully design two general neural network architectures: a pretrained two-way neural network model and a deep contextualized model trained on a text gap-filling task. Experiments on four real-word datasets show that our proposed two-way neural network models can achieve competitive or even much better results. Empirical evidence confirms that modeling both past and future context is a promising way to offer better recommendation accuracy.