Collaborative Filtering with Network Representation Learning for Citation Recommendation

Citation recommendation is important in the environment of scholarly big data, where finding relevant papers has become more difficult because of information overload. Applying traditional collaborative filtering (CF) to citation recommendation is rather challenging due to the cold start problem and the lack of paper ratings. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we propose a Collaborative filtering with Network representation learning framework for Citation Recommendation dubbed as CNCRec, which is a hybrid user-based CF considering both paper content and network topology. It aims at recommending citations in heterogeneous academic information networks. CNCRec creates the paper rating matrix based on attributed citation network representation learning, where the attributes are topics extracted from the paper text information. Meanwhile, the learned representations of attributed collaboration network is utilized to improve the selection of nearest neighbors. By harnessing the power of network representation learning, CNCRec is able to make full use of the whole citation network topology compared with previous context-aware network-based models. Extensive experiments on both DBLP and APS datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, recall, and Mean Reciprocal Rank. Moreover, CNCRec can better solve the data sparsity problem compared with other CF-based baselines.