DUALRec: A Hybrid Sequential and Language Model Framework for Context-Aware Movie Recommendation

The modern recommender systems are facing an increasing challenge of modelling and predicting the dynamic and context-rich user preferences. Traditional collaborative filtering and content-based methods often struggle to capture the temporal patternings and evolving user intentions. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained gradual attention in recent years, by their strong semantic understanding and reasoning abilities, they are not inherently designed to model chronologically evolving user preference and intentions. On the other hand, for sequential models like LSTM (Long-Short-Term-Memory) which is good at capturing the temporal dynamics of user behaviour and evolving user preference over time, but still lacks a rich semantic understanding for comprehensive recommendation generation. In this study, we propose DUALRec (Dynamic User-Aware Language-based Recommender), a novel recommender that leverages the complementary strength of both models, which combines the temporal modelling abilities of LSTM networks with semantic reasoning power of the fine-tuned Large Language Models. The LSTM component will capture users evolving preference through their viewing history, while the fine-tuned LLM variants will leverage these temporal user insights to generate next movies that users might enjoy. Experimental results on MovieLens-1M dataset shows that the DUALRec model outperforms a wide range of baseline models, with comprehensive evaluation matrices of Hit Rate (HR@k), Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG@k), and genre similarity metrics. This research proposes a novel architecture that bridges the gap between temporal sequence modeling and semantic reasoning, and offers a promising direction for developing more intelligent and context-aware recommenders.