Personalized Recommendation Based on Reviews and Ratings Alleviating the Sparsity Problem of Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

With the development of e-commerce, shopping on-line is becoming more and more popular. When we need to decide whether to purchase a product or not on line, the opinions of others become important. The convenience of new web technologies enables us to freely express our opinions and reviews for various products we have purchased which leads to a serious problem, information overloading. How to mine these review data to understand customers' preferences and make recommendations is crucial to merchants and researchers. Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm is one of the most successful recommendation system technologies. The core idea of CF algorithm is to recommend products based on other people who have similar tastes with target users. However, the ability of CF is limited by the sparsity problem, which is very common in reality. The reason derives from the fact that traditional CF method only takes users' ratings into account. In this paper, we propose a new personalized recommendation model, i.e. topic model based collaborative filtering (TMCF) utilizing users' reviews and ratings. We exploit extended LDA model to generate topic allocations for each review and then obtain each user's preference. Moreover, a new metric is designed to measure similarity between users alleviating the sparsity problem to a large extent. Finally, recommendations are made based on similar users' ratings. Experiments on seven data sets indicate better prediction accuracy than other traditional and state-of-the-art methods with substantial improvement in alleviating the sparsity problem.