Web-to-voice transfer for product recommendation on voice

While product recommendation algorithms on the Web are wellsupported by a vast amount of interaction data, the same is not true on Voice. A promising approach to mitigate the issue is transfer learning, i.e., transferring the knowledge of customers’ shopping behaviors learned from their shopping activities on the Web to Voice. Such a Web-to-Voice transfer is challenging due to customers’ distinct shopping behaviors on Voice: customers are inclined to purchase more low-consideration products and are more likely to purchase certain products repeatedly. This paper presents TransV, a novel Web-to-Voice neural transfer network that allows for effective transfer of customers’ shopping patterns from the Web to Voice, while taking into account customers’ distinct purchase patterns on Voice. Our method extends the state-of-the-art self-attention neural architecture with a multi-level tri-factorization neural component, which allows to explicitly capture the similarity and dissimilarity of customers’ shopping patterns on the Web and Voice. To model repeated purchases, TransV adopts a recency-based copy mechanism that considers the impact of the recency of historical purchases on customers’ behavior of repeated purchases. Extensive validation on multiple real-world datasets, including two cross-platform datasets from Amazon.com and Amazon Alexa, shows that our method is able to improve voice-based recommendation substantially by 26.8% as compared with non-transfer learning methods.