Multi-view graph contrastive learning for social recommendation

With the rapid popularity of online social media, recommendation systems have increasingly harnessed social relations to enhance user-item interactions and mitigate the data sparsity issue. Beyond social connections, the semantic relatedness among items has emerged as a crucial factor in comprehending their inherent connections. In this work, we propose a novel Multi-view Contrastive learning framework for Social Recommendation, named MultiCSR. This framework adaptively incorporates user social networks and item knowledge graphs into modeling users preferences within recommendation systems. To facilitate the alignment of different views, we introduce a dedicated multi-view contrastive learning process that extracts rich information from each view and foster mutual enhancement. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework over representative recommendation methods. Furthermore, ablation studies offer a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying our framework.