Junyoung Kim  Hyunsoo  Jongwuk Lee

10.5626/JOK.2025.52.5.435

recommendation systems natural language models text-based recommendation models nearest neighbor mechanism

Sequential recommendation task aims to predict the next item to interact with based on users’ interaction history. Text-based recommendation models, which represent items as text, show improved performance in cold-start problems and zero-shot recommendation tasks. However, they suffer from textual bias and the lack of collaborative knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we propose a text-based recommendation model inference framework using the nearest neighbor mechanism. The proposed method leverages text-based recommendation models as a neighbor retriever model to search neighbors with similar preferences to the user and aggregate the neighbor information with existing recommendation results to improve recommendation performance. Experiments conducted on four datasets show that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing models, with performance improvement up to 25.27% on NDCG@50. Furthermore, the proposed method effectively complements collaborative knowledge and improves model explainability by providing recommendation rationale.