Review-Based Recommender Systems: A Proposed Rating Prediction Scheme Using Word Embedding Representation of Reviews

Abstract Recommender systems nowadays play an important role in providing helpful information for users, especially in ecommerce applications. Many of the proposed models use rating histories of the users in order to predict unknown ratings. Recently, users’ reviews as a valuable source of knowledge have attracted the attention of researchers in this field and a new category denoted as review-based recommender systems has emerged. In this study, we make use of the information included in user reviews as well as available rating scores to develop a review-based rating prediction system. The proposed scheme attempts to handle the uncertainty problem of the rating histories, by fuzzifying the given ratings. Another advantage of the proposed system is the use of a word embedding representation model for textual reviews, instead of using traditional models such as binary bag of words and TFIDF 1 vector space. It also makes use of the helpfulness voting scores, in order to prune data and achieve better results. The effectiveness of the rating prediction scheme as well as the final recommender system was evaluated against the Amazon dataset. Experimental results revealed that the proposed recommender system outperforms its counterparts and can be used as a suitable tool in ecommerce environments.