Exploiting the Sentimental Bias between Ratings and Reviews for Enhancing Recommendation

Abstract

In real-world recommendation scenarios, there are two common phenomena: 1) users only provide ratings but there is no review comment. As a result, the historical transaction data available for recommender system are usually unbalanced and sparse; 2) Users' opinions can be better grasped in their reviews than ratings. This indicates that there is always a bias between ratings and reviews. Therefore, it is important that users' ratings and reviews should be mutually reinforced to grasp the users' true opinions. To this end, in this paper, we develop an opinion mining model based on convolutional neural networks for enhancing recommendation (NeuO). Specifically, we exploit a two-step training neural networks, which utilize both reviews and ratings to grasp users' true opinions in unbalanced data. Moreover, we propose a Sentiment Classification scoring method (SC), which employs dual attention vectors to predict the users' sentiment scores of their reviews. A combination function is designed to use the results of SC and user-item rating matrix to catch the opinion bias. Finally, a Multilayer perceptron based Matrix Factorization (MMF) method is proposed to make recommendations with the enhanced user-item matrix. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our approach can achieve a superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines on real-world datasets.