  Existing item-based collaborative filtering (ICF) methods leverage only the
relation of collaborative similarity. Nevertheless, there exist multiple
relations between items in real-world scenarios. Distinct from the
collaborative similarity that implies co-interact patterns from the user
perspective, these relations reveal fine-grained knowledge on items from
different perspectives of meta-data, functionality, etc. However, how to
incorporate multiple item relations is less explored in recommendation
research. In this work, we propose Relational Collaborative Filtering (RCF), a
general framework to exploit multiple relations between items in recommender
system. We find that both the relation type and the relation value are crucial
in inferring user preference. To this end, we develop a two-level hierarchical
attention mechanism to model user preference. The first-level attention
discriminates which types of relations are more important, and the second-level
attention considers the specific relation values to estimate the contribution
of a historical item in recommending the target item. To make the item
embeddings be reflective of the relational structure between items, we further
formulate a task to preserve the item relations, and jointly train it with the
recommendation task of preference modeling. Empirical results on two real
datasets demonstrate the strong performance of RCF. Furthermore, we also
conduct qualitative analyses to show the benefits of explanations brought by
the modeling of multiple item relations.
