Extracting contextual insights from user reviews for recommender systems: a novel method

Abstract

Recommender systems (RS) primarily rely on user feedback as a core foundation for making recommendations. Traditional recommenders predominantly rely on historical data, which often presents challenges due to data scarcity issues. Despite containing a substantial wealth of valuable and comprehensive knowledge, user reviews remain largely overlooked by many existing recommender systems. Within these reviews, there lies an opportunity to extract valuable insights, including user preferences and contextual information, which could be seamlessly integrated into recommender systems to significantly enhance the accuracy of the recommendations they provide. This paper introduces an innovative approach to building context-aware RS, spanning from data extraction to ratings prediction. Our approach revolves around three essential components. The first component involves corpus creation, leveraging Dbpedia as a data source. The second component encompasses a tailored named entity recognition (NER) mechanism for the extraction of contextual data. This NER system harnesses the power of advanced models such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), bidirectional long short term memory (Bi-LSTM), and bidirectional conditional random field (Bi-CRF). The final component introduces a novel variation of factorization machines for the prediction of ratings called contextual factorization machines. Our experimental results showcase robust performance in both the contextual data extraction phase and the ratings prediction phase, surpassing the capabilities of existing state-of-the-art methods. These findings underscore the significant potential of our approach to elevate the quality of recommendations within the realm of context-aware recommender systems.