Hotel recommendation algorithms based on online reviews and probabilistic linguistic term sets

Abstract

The continuous development of e-commerce recommendation systems enables people to better obtain the products they need, saving economic and time costs. When recommending products, massive online user reviews can objectively reflect the efficacy of products and provide more practical reference value. However, due to the fuzziness of expression, there exists great uncertainty about the information in user reviews. The probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS) is a useful tool that can help solve the information ambiguity and distinguish the importance of different terms. This paper regards PLTS as a data statistical tool to depict the information of user reviews. Based on the theory of PLTS, this paper proposes a hotel recommendation algorithm. First, we analyse the statements of online user hotel reviews with the aid of Jieba and TF-IDF. Second, the statements of reviews are translated into PLTSs and stored in the evaluation matrix. Third, we adopt the maximum deviation method to derive the attribute weights of hotels. Finally, we use probabilistic linguistic cosine similarity to calculate the similarity degrees of hotels and rank the recommended hotels according to similarity. With respect to different hospital products of users, the recommendation orders of hotels are given according to their degrees of similarity. To verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm, this paper selects 10 hotels in the city of Zhengzhou for case application and conducts a comparative analysis with other recommendation methods.