Modeling Instant User Intent and Content-level Transition for Sequential Fashion Recommendation

Fashion recommendation, aiming to explore specific user preference in fashion, has become an important research topic for its practical significance to the fashion business sector. However, little work has been done on an important sub-task called sequential fashion recommendation, which aims to capture additional short-term fashion interest of users by modeling the item-to-item transitions. In this paper, we propose a novel Attentional Content-level Translation-based Recommender (ACTR) framework, which simultaneously models the instant user intent of each transition and the intent-specific transition probability. Specifically, we define instant intent with the relationships between adjacent items that the users interacted, which are the three fundamental domain-specific relationships of: match, substitute and others. To further exploit the characteristics of fashion domain and alleviate the item transition sparsity problem, we augment the item-level transition modeling with multiple sub-transitions using various content-level attributes. An attention mechanism is further devised to effectively aggregate multiple content-level transitions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that specifies the implicit user actions in fashion shopping with explicit instant intent and through which to enhance the connectivity of fashion items to boost the recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on two real-world fashion E-commerce datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in sequential fashion recommendation task.