Unifying Structured Data as Graph for Data-to-Text Pre-Training

Data-to-text (D2T) generation aims to transform structured data into natural language text. Data-to-text pre-training has proved to be powerful in enhancing D2T generation and yields impressive performances. However, previous pre-training methods either oversimplified structured data into a sequence without considering input structures or designed training objectives tailored for a specific data structure (e.g., table or knowledge graph). In this paper, we unify different types of structured data (i.e., table, key-value data, knowledge graph) into the graph format and cast different data-to-text generation tasks as graph-to-text generation. To effectively exploit the structural information of the input graph, we propose a structure-enhanced pre-training method for D2T generation by designing a structure-enhanced Transformer. Concretely, we devise a position matrix for the Transformer, encoding relative positional information of connected nodes in the input graph. In addition, we propose a new attention matrix to incorporate graph structures into the original Transformer by taking the available explicit connectivity structure into account. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our model. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/unid2t.

Tenrec: A Large-scale Multipurpose Benchmark Dataset for Recommender Systems

Existing benchmark datasets for recommender systems (RS) either are created at a small scale or involve very limited forms of user feedback. RS models evaluated on such datasets often lack practical values for large-scale real-world applications. In this paper, we describe Tenrec, a novel and publicly available data collection for RS that records various user feedback from four different recommendation scenarios. To be specific, Tenrec has the following five characteristics: (1) it is large-scale, containing around 5 million users and 140 million interactions; (2) it has not only positive user feedback, but also true negative feedback (vs. one-class recommendation); (3) it contains overlapped users and items across four different scenarios; (4) it contains various types of user positive feedback, in forms of clicks, likes, shares, and follows, etc; (5) it contains additional features beyond the user IDs and item IDs. We verify Tenrec on ten diverse recommendation tasks by running several classical baseline models per task. Tenrec has the potential to become a useful benchmark dataset for a majority of popular recommendation tasks.

MEGCF: Multimodal Entity Graph Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Recommendation

In most E-commerce platforms, whether the displayed items trigger the user's interest largely depends on their most eye-catching multimodal content. Consequently, increasing efforts focus on modeling multimodal user preference, and the pressing paradigm is to incorporate complete multimodal deep features of the items into the recommendation module. However, the existing studies ignore the mismatch problem between multimodal feature extraction (MFE) and user interest modeling (UIM). That is, MFE and UIM have different emphases. Specifically, MFE is migrated from and adapted to upstream tasks such as image classification. In addition, it is mainly a content-oriented and non-personalized process, while UIM, with its greater focus on understanding user interaction, is essentially a user-oriented and personalized process. Therefore, the direct incorporation of MFE into UIM for purely user-oriented tasks, tends to introduce a large number of preference-independent multimodal noise and contaminate the embedding representations in UIM. This paper aims at solving the mismatch problem between MFE and UIM, so as to generate high-quality embedding representations and better model multimodal user preferences. Towards this end, we develop a novel model, MEGCF. The UIM of the proposed model captures the semantic correlation between interactions and the features obtained from MFE, thus making a better match between MFE and UIM. More precisely, semantic-rich entities are first extracted from the multimodal data, since they are more relevant to user preferences than other multimodal information. These entities are then integrated into the user-item interaction graph. Afterwards, a symmetric linear Graph Convolution Network (GCN) module is constructed to perform message propagation over the graph, in order to capture both high-order semantic correlation and collaborative filtering signals.