Collaborative filtering (CF) aims to build a model from users' past behaviors and or similar decisions made by other users, and use the model to recommend items for users. Despite of the success of previous collaborative filtering approaches, they are all based on the assumption that there are sufficient rating scores available for building high-quality recommendation models. In real world applications, however, it is often difficult to collect sufficient rating scores, especially when new items are introduced into the system, which makes the recommendation task challenging. We find that there are often "short" texts describing features of items, based on which we can approximate the similarity of items and make recommendation together with rating scores. In this paper we "borrow" the idea of vector representation of words to capture the information of short texts and embed it into a matrix factorization framework. We empirically show that our approach is effective by comparing it with state-of-the-art approaches.
@cite_29: The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several extensions that improve both the quality of the vectors and the training speed. By subsampling of the frequent words we obtain significant speedup and also learn more regular word representations. We also describe a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling. An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of "Canada" and "Air" cannot be easily combined to obtain "Air Canada". Motivated by this example, we present a simple method for finding phrases in text, and show that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible.
However, most of these approaches do not consider the semantic similarities between the combinations of different words. Differing from these previous approaches, we exploit item descriptions by making use of distributed representations of words @cite_29 to assist with recommendation when rating and labeling data are sparse.