Review Polarity-Wise Recommender

The de facto review-involved recommender systems, using review information to enhance recommendation, have received increasing interest over the past years. Thereinto, one advanced branch is to extract salient aspects from textual reviews (i.e., the item attributes that users express) and combine them with the matrix factorization (MF) technique. However, the existing approaches all ignore the fact that semantically different reviews often include opposite aspect information. In particular, positive reviews usually express aspects that users prefer, while the negative ones describe aspects that users dislike. As a result, it may mislead the recommender systems into making incorrect decisions pertaining to user preference modeling. Toward this end, in this article, we present a review polarity-wise recommender model, dubbed as RPR, to discriminately treat reviews with different polarities. To be specific, in this model, positive and negative reviews are separately gathered and used to model the user-preferred and user-rejected aspects, respectively. Besides, to overcome the imbalance of semantically different reviews, we further develop an aspect-aware importance weighting strategy to align the aspect importance for these two kinds of reviews. Extensive experiments conducted on eight benchmark datasets have demonstrated the superiority of our model when compared with several state-of-the-art review-involved baselines. Moreover, our method can provide certain explanations to real-world rating prediction scenarios.