Zero-Shot Recommender Systems

Performance of recommender systems (RS) relies heavily on the Many large scale e-commerce platforms (such as Etsy, Overstock, amount of training data available. This poses a chicken-and-egg etc) and online content platforms (such as Spotify, Overstock, Disney, problem for early-stage products, whose amount of data, in turn, Netflix, etc) have such a large inventory of items that showcasing relies on the performance of their RS. On the other hand, zero-shot all of them in front of their users is simply not practical. In learning promises some degree of generalization from an old dataset particular, in the online content category of businesses, it is often to an entirely new dataset. In this paper, we explore the possibility seen that users of their service do not have a crisp intent in mind of zero-shot learning in RS. We develop an algorithm, dubbed ZEro-unlike in the retail shopping experience where the users often have Shot Recommenders (ZESRec), that is trained on an old dataset a crisp intent of purchasing something. The need for personalized and generalize to a new one where there are neither overlapping recommendations therefore arises from the fact that not only it is users nor overlapping items, a setting that contrasts typical crossdomain impractical to show all the items in the catalogue but often times RS that has either overlapping users or items. Different users of such services need help discovering the next best thing from categorical item indices, i.e., item ID, in previous methods, -- be it the new and exciting movie or be it a new music album or ZESRec uses items' natural-language descriptions (or description even a piece of merchandise that they may want to consider for embeddings) as their continuous indices, and therefore naturally future buying if not immediately.