Recent studies in recommender systems have managed to achieve significantly improved performance by leveraging reviews for rating prediction. However, despite being extensively studied, these methods still suffer from some limitations. First, previous studies either encode the document or extract latent sentiment via neural networks, which are difficult to interpret the sentiment of reviewers intuitively. Second, they neglect the personalized interaction of reviews with user/item, i.e., each review has different contributions when modeling the sentiment preference of user/item. To remedy these issues, we propose a Sentiment-aware Interactive Fusion Network (SIFN) for review-based item recommendation. Specifically, we first encode user/item reviews via BERT and propose a light-weighted sentiment learner to extract semantic features of each review. Then, we propose a sentiment prediction task that guides the sentiment learner to extract sentiment-aware features via explicit sentiment labels. Finally, we design a rating prediction task that contains a rating learner with an interactive and fusion module to fuse the identity (i.e., user and item ID) and each review representation so that various interactive features can synergistically influence the final rating score. Experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to state-of-the-art models.
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia（马来西亚国民大学）；Taiz University（塔伊兹大学）
Recommender system has been proven to be significantly crucial in many fields and is widely used by various domains. Most of the conventional recommender systems rely on the numeric rating given by a user to reflect his opinion about a consumed item; however, these ratings are not available in many domains. As a result, a new source of information represented by the user-generated reviews is incorporated in the recommendation process to compensate for the lack of these ratings. The reviews contain prosperous and numerous information related to the whole item or a specific feature that can be e…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；NEC Labs America（NEC美国实验室）
Compliments and concerns in reviews are valuable for understanding users' shopping interests and their opinions with respect to specific aspects of certain items. Existing review-based recommenders favor large and complex language encoders that can only learn latent and uninterpretable text representations. They lack explicit user attention and item property modeling, which however could provide valuable information beyond the ability to recommend items. Therefore, we propose a tightly coupled two-stage approach, including an Aspect-Sentiment Pair Extractor (ASPE) and an Attention-Property-awa…
NEC Labs Europe（NEC欧洲实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
The text of a review expresses the sentiment a customer has towards a particular product. This is exploited in sentiment analysis where machine learning models are used to predict the review score from the text of the review. Furthermore, the products costumers have purchased in the past are indicative of the products they will purchase in the future. This is what recommender systems exploit by learning models from purchase information to predict the items a customer might be interested in. We propose TransRev, an approach to the product recommendation problem that integrates ideas from recomm…
Spatial item recommendation has become an important means to help people discover interesting locations, especially when people pay a visit to unfamiliar regions. Some current researches are focusing on modelling individual and collective geographical preferences for spatial item recommendation based on users' check-in records, but they fail to explore the phenomenon of user interest drift across geographical regions, i.e., users would show different interests when they travel to different regions. Besides, they ignore the influence of public comments for subsequent users' check-in behaviors. …
This paper presents Fiducia, a food review system involving a pipeline which processes restaurant-related reviews obtained from Zomato (India's largest restaurant search and discovery service). Fiducia is specific to popular cafe food items and manages to identify relevant information pertaining to each item separately in the reviews. It uses a sentiment check on these pieces of text and accordingly suggests an appropriate restaurant for the particular item depending on user-item and item-item similarity. Experimental results show that the sentiment analyzer module of Fiducia achieves an accur…
User reviews contain rich semantics towards the preference of users to features of items. Recently, many deep learning based solutions have been proposed by exploiting reviews for recommendation. The attention mechanism is mainly adopted in these works to identify words or aspects that are important for rating prediction. However, it is still hard to understand whether a user likes or dislikes an aspect of an item according to what viewpoint the user holds and to what extent, without examining the review details. Here, we consider a pair of a viewpoint held by a user and an aspect of an item a…
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Tips, as a compacted and concise form of reviews, were paid less attention by researchers. In this paper, we investigate the task of tips generation by considering the `persona' information which captures the intrinsic language style of the users or the different characteristics of the product items. In order to exploit the persona information, we propose a framework based on adversarial variational auto-encoders (aVAE) for persona modeling from the historical tips and reviews of users and items. The latent variables from aVAE are regarded as persona embeddings. Besides representing persona us…
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Textual explanations have proved to help improve user satisfaction on machine-made recommendations. However, current mainstream solutions loosely connect the learning of explanation with the learning of recommendation: for example, they are often separately modeled as rating prediction and content generation tasks. In this work, we propose to strengthen their connection by enforcing the idea of sentiment alignment between a recommendation and its corresponding explanation. At training time, the two learning tasks are joined by a latent sentiment vector, which is encoded by the recommendation m…
Disentangling Likes and Dislikes in Personalized Generative Explainable Recommendation
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；ZOZO Research（ZOZO研究）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Chiba Institute of Technology（千叶科学技术大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
This work investigates the role of factors like training method, training corpus size and thematic relevance of texts in the performance of word embedding features on sentiment analysis of tweets, song lyrics, movie reviews and item reviews. We also explore specific training or post-processing methods that can be used to enhance the performance of word embeddings in certain tasks or domains. Our empirical observations indicate that models trained with multithematic texts that are large and rich in vocabulary are the best in answering syntactic and semantic word analogy questions. We further ob…
News recommender systems are used by online news providers to alleviate information overload and to provide personalized content to users. However, algorithmic news curation has been hypothesized to create filter bubbles and to intensify users' selective exposure, potentially increasing their vulnerability to polarized opinions and fake news. In this paper, we show how information on news items' stance and sentiment can be utilized to analyze and quantify the extent to which recommender systems suffer from biases. To that end, we have annotated a German news corpus on the topic of migration us…
A route recommendation system can provide better recommendation if it also takes collected user reviews into account, e.g. places that generally get positive reviews may be preferred. However, to classify sentiment, many classification algorithms existing today suffer in handling small data items such as short written reviews. In this paper we propose a model for a strongly relevant route recommendation system that is based on an MDL-based (Minimum Description Length) sentiment classification and show that such a system is capable of handling small data items (short user reviews). Another high…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research（信息通信研究院）
This paper proposes a new neural architecture for collaborative ranking with implicit feedback. Our model, LRML (\textit{Latent Relational Metric Learning}) is a novel metric learning approach for recommendation. More specifically, instead of simple push-pull mechanisms between user and item pairs, we propose to learn latent relations that describe each user item interaction. This helps to alleviate the potential geometric inflexibility of existing metric learing approaches. This enables not only better performance but also a greater extent of modeling capability, allowing our model to scale t…
The widespread use of online review sites over the past decade has motivated businesses of all types to possess an expansive arsenal of user feedback to mark their reputation. Though a significant proportion of purchasing decisions are driven by average rating, detailed reviews are critical for activities like buying expensive digital SLR camera. Since writing a detailed review for an item is usually time-consuming, the number of reviews available in the Web is far from many. Given a user and an item our goal is to identify the top-$k$ meaningful phrases/tags to help her review the item easily…
As a fundamental yet significant process in personalized recommendation, candidate generation and suggestion effectively help users spot the most suitable items for them. Consequently, identifying substitutable items that are interchangeable opens up new opportunities to refine the quality of generated candidates. When a user is browsing a specific type of product (e.g., a laptop) to buy, the accurate recommendation of substitutes (e.g., better equipped laptops) can offer the user more suitable options to choose from, thus substantially increasing the chance of a successful purchase. However, …
Although personalized recommendation has been investigated for decades, the wide adoption of Latent Factor Models (LFM) has made the explainability of recommendations a critical issue to both the research community and practical application of recommender systems. For example, in many practical systems the algorithm just provides a personalized item recommendation list to the users, without persuasive personalized explanation about why such an item is recommended while another is not. Unexplainable recommendations introduce negative effects to the trustworthiness of recommender systems, and th…
Preference Discerning with LLM-Enhanced Generative Retrieval
ELLIS Unit, LIT AI Lab, Institute for Machine Learning, JKU Linz（ELLIS单位、LIT人工智能实验室、机器学习研究所、JKU林茨）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；AI at Meta（Meta人工智能）
This paper presents the D2KLab team's approach to the RecSys Challenge 2019 which focuses on the task of recommending accommodations based on user sessions. What is the feeling of a person who says "Rooms of the hotel are enormous, staff are friendly and efficient"? It is positive. Similarly to the sequence of words in a sentence where one can affirm what the feeling is, analysing a sequence of actions performed by a user in a website can lead to predict what will be the item the user will add to his basket at the end of the shopping session. We propose to use a many-to-one recurrent neural ne…
