A deep recommendation model of cross-grained sentiments of user reviews and ratings

Abstract

The matrix factorization model based on user-item rating data has been widely studied and applied in recommender systems. However, data sparsity, the cold-start problem, and poor explainability have restricted its performance. Textual reviews usually contain rich information about items’ features and users’ sentiments and preferences, which can solve the problem of insufficient information from only user ratings. However, most recommendation algorithms that take sentiment analysis of review texts into account are either fine- or coarse-grained, but not both, leading to uncertain accuracy and comprehensiveness regarding user preference. This study proposes a deep learning recommendation model (i.e., DeepCGSR) that integrates textual review sentiments and the rating matrix. DeepCGSR uses the review sets of users and items as a corpus to perform cross-grained sentiment analysis by combining fine- and coarse-grained levels to extract sentiment feature vectors for users and items. Deep learning technology is used to map between the extracted feature vector and latent factor through the rating-based matrix factorization model and obtain deep, nonlinear features to predict the user's rating of an item. Iterative experiments on e-commerce datasets from Amazon show that DeepCGSR consistently outperforms the recommendation models LFM, SVD++, DeepCoNN, TOPICMF, and NARRE. Overall, comparing with other recommendation models, the DeepCGSR model demonstrated improved evaluation results by 14.113% over LFM, 13.786% over SVD++, 9.920% over TOPICMF, 5.122% over DeepCoNN, and 2.765% over NARRE. Meanwhile, the DeepCGSR has great potential in fixing the overfitting and cold-start problems. Built upon previous studies and findings, the DeepCGSR is the state of the art, moving the design and development of the recommendation algorithms forward with improved recommendation accuracy.