  Item cold-start is a classical issue in recommender systems that affects
anime and manga recommendations as well. This problem can be framed as follows:
how to predict whether a user will like a manga that received few ratings from
the community? Content-based techniques can alleviate this issue but require
extra information, that is usually expensive to gather. In this paper, we use a
deep learning technique, Illustration2Vec, to easily extract tag information
from the manga and anime posters (e.g., sword, or ponytail). We propose BALSE
(Blended Alternate Least Squares with Explanation), a new model for
collaborative filtering, that benefits from this extra information to recommend
mangas. We show, using real data from an online manga recommender system called
Mangaki, that our model improves substantially the quality of recommendations,
especially for less-known manga, and is able to provide an interpretation of
the taste of the users.
