# Modeling Long-Term and Short-Term Interests with Parallel Attentions for Session-based Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.15346 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15346/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Exploiting Session Information in BERT-based Session-aware Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10851/) (2022)
- [IDNP: Interest Dynamics Modeling using Generative Neural Processes for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04600/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The aim of session-based recommendation is to predict the users' next clicked item, which is a challenging task due to the inherent uncertainty in user behaviors and anonymous implicit feedback information. A powerful session-based recommender can typically explore the users' evolving interests (i.e., a combination of his/her long-term and short-term interests). Recent advances in attention mechanisms have led to state-of-the-art methods for solving this task. However, there are two main drawbacks. First, most of the attention-based methods only simply utilize the last clicked item to represent the user's short-term interest ignoring the temporal information and behavior context, which may fail to capture the recent preference of users comprehensively. Second, current studies typically think long-term and short-term interests as equally important, but the importance of them should be user-specific. Therefore, we propose a novel Parallel Attention Network model (PAN) for Session-based Recommendation. Specifically, we propose a novel time-aware attention mechanism to learn user's short-term interest by taking into account the contextual information and temporal signals simultaneously. Besides, we introduce a gated fusion method that adaptively integrates the user's long-term and short-term preferences to generate the hybrid interest representation. Experiments on the three real-world datasets show that PAN achieves obvious improvements than the state-of-the-art methods.