UniTRec: A Unified Text-to-Text Transformer and Joint Contrastive
  Learning Framework for Text-based Recommendation
Zhiming Mao Huimin Wang Yiming Du Kam-fai Wong
Prior study has shown that pretrained language models (PLM) can boost the
performance of text-based recommendation. In contrast to previous works that
either use PLM to encode user history as a whole input text, or impose an
additional aggregation network to fuse multi-turn history representations, we
propose a unified local- and global-attention Transformer encoder to better
model two-level contexts of user history. Moreover, conditioned on user history
encoded by Transformer encoders, our framework leverages Transformer decoders
to estimate the language perplexity of candidate text items, which can serve as
a straightforward yet significant contrastive signal for user-item text
matching. Based on this, our framework, UniTRec, unifies the contrastive
objectives of discriminative matching scores and candidate text perplexity to
jointly enhance text-based recommendation. Extensive evaluation shows that
UniTRec delivers SOTA performance on three text-based recommendation tasks.
Code is available at https://github.com/Veason-silverbullet/UniTRec.