A multi-aspect user-interest model based on sentiment analysis and uncertainty theory for recommender systems

Abstract

This work presents a new multi-aspect user-interest model for recommender systems to improve recommendation and prediction accuracy. We introduce the overall user satisfaction for a product to build a user-interest profile by computing the user-interest levels from multi-aspect reviews. A domain emotional dictionary is built to overcome the gap in quantity between negative and positive words for sentiment polarity analysis. A sentiment analysis model is designed to characterize the users’ sentiment polarity and strength based on uncertainty theory and the domain emotional dictionary. Accordingly, a new multi-aspect user-interest model is proposed by considering the sentiment analysis model with the user-interest profile. Then, our proposed model is applied to recommender systems and experimentally tested on five products of different categories from three e-commerce websites. Our model not only outperforms the traditional and state-of-the-art models on rating prediction tasks but also improves the recommendation accuracy in multiple domains.