Neural Conversation Recommendation with Online Interaction Modeling

AbstractThe prevalent use of social media leads to a vast amount of online conversations being produced on a daily basis. It presents a concrete challenge for individuals to better discover and engage in social media discussions. In this paper, we present a novel framework to automatically recommend conversations to users based on their prior conversation behaviors. Built on neural collaborative filtering, our model explores deep semantic features that measure how a user’s preferences match an ongoing conversation’s context. Furthermore, to identify salient characteristics from interleaving user interactions, our model incorporates graph-structured networks, where both replying relations and temporal features are encoded as conversation context. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets collected from Twitter and Reddit show that our model yields better performance than previous state-of-the-art models, which only utilize lexical features and ignore past user interactions in the conversations.