Sociological-Theory-Based Multitopic Self-Supervised Recommendation

Social relationships offer crucial supplementary information for recommendations by leveraging users’ social connections to gain insights into their preferences. However, prevalent social recommendation methods often grapple with the issues of sparsity and noise, which curtail their effectiveness. In addition, these methods overlook the intricacies of user interactions within social networks, which could provide invaluable information. Addressing their deficiencies, this article introduces a novel sociological-theory-based multitopic self-supervised recommendation method (SMSR). This method integrates user attitude information into the construction of social relationships and utilizes dynamic routing to identify and categorize topics, thereby mitigating the impact of social noise on recommendation accuracy. Furthermore, we reveal sophisticated higher order user relations within these topics by using motifs. By combining the light graph convolutional network with balance theory, SMSR efficiently aggregates information from diverse social relations to gain its outstanding performance. Moreover, we have devised and integrated four self-supervised signals, inspired by social theory and derived from heterogeneous graph analysis, to more effectively exploit the rich structural and semantic information inherent in social relationship graphs. Empirical results from extensive experiments on publicly available datasets underscore SMSR’s superiority over the state of the art.