Recommendation by Users' Multimodal Preferences for Smart City Applications

As an essential role in smart city applications, personalized recommender systems help users to find their potentially interested items from their historically generated data. Recently, researchers have started to utilize the massive user-generated multimodal contents to improve recommendation performance. However, previous methods have at least one of the following drawbacks: 1) employing shallow models, which cannot well capture high-level conceptual information; 2) failing to capture personalized user visual preference. In this article, we present a deep users' multimodal preferences-based recommendation (UMPR) method to capture the textual and visual matching of users and items for recommendation. We extract textual matching from historical reviews. We construct users' visual preference embeddings to model users' visual preference and match them with items' visual embeddings to obtain the visual matching. We apply UMPR on two applications related to smart city: restaurant recommendation and product recommendation. Experiments show that UMPR outperforms competitive baseline methods.