  In a variety of application domains the content to be recommended to users is
associated with text. This includes research papers, movies with associated
plot summaries, news articles, blog posts, etc. Recommendation approaches based
on latent factor models can be extended naturally to leverage text by employing
an explicit mapping from text to factors. This enables recommendations for new,
unseen content, and may generalize better, since the factors for all items are
produced by a compactly-parametrized model. Previous work has used topic models
or averages of word embeddings for this mapping. In this paper we present a
method leveraging deep recurrent neural networks to encode the text sequence
into a latent vector, specifically gated recurrent units (GRUs) trained
end-to-end on the collaborative filtering task. For the task of scientific
paper recommendation, this yields models with significantly higher accuracy. In
cold-start scenarios, we beat the previous state-of-the-art, all of which
ignore word order. Performance is further improved by multi-task learning,
where the text encoder network is trained for a combination of content
recommendation and item metadata prediction. This regularizes the collaborative
filtering model, ameliorating the problem of sparsity of the observed rating
matrix.
