Integrating selection-based aspect sentiment and preference knowledge for social recommender systems

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Chen, Y.Y. ORCID: 0000-0003-2773-2933, Wiratunga, N. and Lothian, R., 2019. Integrating selection-based aspect sentiment and preference knowledge for social recommender systems. Online Information Review. ISSN 1468-4527

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Official URL: http://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-02-2017-0066

Abstract

Purpose - Recommender system approaches such as collaborative and content-based filtering rely on user ratings and product descriptions to recommend products. More recently, recommender system research has focused on exploiting knowledge from user-generated content such as product reviews to enhance recommendation performance. In this work, we show that the performance of a recommender system can be enhanced by integrating explicit knowledge extracted from product reviews with implicit knowledge extracted from analysis of consumer's purchase behaviour.

Design/methodology/approach - We introduce a sentiment and preference-guided strategy for product recommendation by integrating not only explicit, user-generated and sentiment-rich content but also implicit knowledge gleaned from users' product purchase preferences. Integration of both of these knowledge sources helps to model sentiment over a set of product aspects. We show how established dimensionality reduction and feature weighting approaches from text classification can be adopted to weight and select an optimal subset of aspects for recommendation tasks. We compare our proposed approach against several baseline methods as well as the state-of-the-art Better method, which recommends products that are superior to a query product.

Findings - Evaluation results from seven different product categories show that aspect weighting and selection significantly improves state-of-the-art recommendation approaches. Research limitations/implications - The proposed approach recommends products by analysing user sentiment on product aspects. Therefore, the proposed approach can be used to develop recommender systems that can explain to users why a product is recommended. This is achieved by presenting an analysis of sentiment distribution over individual aspects that describe a given product.

Originality/value - This paper describes a novel approach to integrate consumer purchase behaviour analysis and aspect-level sentiment analysis to enhance recommendation. In particular, we introduce the idea of aspect weighting and selection to help users identify better products. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical benefits of this approach on a variety of product categories and compare our approach with the current state-of-the-art approaches.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Online Information Review

Creators:

Chen, Y.Y., Wiratunga, N. and Lothian, R.

Publisher:

Emerald

Date:

13 December 2019

ISSN:

1468-4527