A novel deep learning-based recommender system for Arabic content

Abstract

In the era of big data, recommender systems (RSs) have become growing essential tools. They represent important machine learning solutions that mainly contribute to keeping users engaged with personalized content in e-platforms. Several RSs have been proposed in the literature, and most of them have focused on English content. However, for content in other languages like Arabic, very restricted works have been done to develop RSs. In recent times, the Arabic content on the Web has increased significantly because of the growing number of Arabic web users. This highlights the need for building RSs for Arabic content. To better handle this challenge, we decided to provide the research community with a novel deep learning (DL)-based RS devoted to Arabic content. The main goal of the proposed RS is to predict user preferences from textual reviews written in the Arabic language. This is achieved by combining two independent DL techniques into one system: a convolutional neural network (CNN)-text processor for representing users and items; and a neural network, in particular, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to estimate interactions between user-item pairs. Extensive experiments on four large-scale Arabic datasets demonstrate that our proposed system can achieve better prediction accuracy than other state-of-the-art alternatives. Notably, it improves the MSE between 0.84% and 16.96%, and the MAE between 0.14% and 13.71%. This work is the first attempt designed to deal with a large volume of data in the Arabic context, opening up new research possibilities for future developments of Arabic RSs.