Deep neural review text interaction for recommendation systems

Abstract

Users’ reviews contain valuable information which are not taken into account in most recommender systems. According to the latest studies in this field, using review texts could not only improve the performance of recommendation, but it can also alleviate the impact of data sparsity and help to tackle this problem. In this paper, we present a neural recommender model which recommends items by leveraging user reviews. In order to predict user rating for each item, our proposed model, named MatchPyramidRecommenderSystem (MPRS), represents each user and item with their corresponding review texts. Thus, the problem of recommendation is viewed as a text matching problem such that the matching score obtained from matching user and item texts could be considered as a good representative of their joint extent of similarity. To solve the text matching problem, inspired by MatchPyramid (Pang et al., 2016), we employed an interaction-based approach according to which a matching matrix is constructed given a pair of input texts. The matching matrix, which has the property of hierarchical matching patterns, is then fed into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to compute the matching score for the given user–item pair. Our experiments on the small data categories of Amazon review dataset show that our proposed model gains from 1.76% to 21.72% relative improvement compared to DeepCoNN model (Zheng et al., 2017), and from 0.83% to 3.15% relative improvement compared to TransNets model (Catherine and Cohen, 2017). Also, on two large categories, namely AZ-CSJ and AZ-Mov, our model achieves relative improvements of 8.08% and 7.56% compared to the DeepCoNN model, and relative improvements of 1.74% and 0.86% compared to the TransNets model, respectively.