Neural Attentional Rating Regression with Review-level Explanations

Reviews information is dominant for users to make online purchasing decisions in e-commerces. However, the usefulness of reviews is varied. We argue that less-useful reviews hurt model's performance, and are also less meaningful for user's reference. While some existing models utilize reviews for improving the performance of recommender systems, few of them consider the usefulness of reviews for recommendation quality. In this paper, we introduce a novel attention mechanism to explore the usefulness of reviews, and propose a Neural Attentional Regression model with Review-level Explanations (NARRE) for recommendation. Specifically, NARRE can not only predict precise ratings, but also learn the usefulness of each review simultaneously. Therefore, the highly-useful reviews are obtained which provide review-level explanations to help users make better and faster decisions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets of Amazon and Yelp on different domains show that the proposed NARRE model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation approaches, including PMF, NMF, SVD++, HFT, and DeepCoNN in terms of rating prediction, by the proposed attention model that takes review usefulness into consideration. Furthermore, the selected reviews are shown to be effective when taking existing review-usefulness ratings in the system as ground truth. Besides, crowd-sourcing based evaluations reveal that in most cases, NARRE achieves equal or even better performances than system's usefulness rating method in selecting reviews. And it is flexible to offer great help on the dominant cases in real e-commerce scenarios when the ratings on review-usefulness are not available in the system.