Abstract:

Review-based recommendations are mainly based on the exploitation of textual information that reflects the characteristics of items and user preferences. However, most existing approaches overlook the influence of information from hidden strangers on the selection of reviews for the target user. However, information from strangers can more accurately measure the relative feelings of the user and provide a complement to the target user’s expression, leading to more refined user modeling. Recently, several studies have attempted to incorporate similar information from strangers but ignore the use of information regarding other strangers. In this study, we proposed a stranger collaborative review-based recommendation model to make effective use of information from strangers by improving accurate modeling and enriching user modeling. Specifically, for capturing potential user preferences elaborately, we first designed a collaborative stranger attention module considering the textual similarities and preference interactions between the target user and the hidden strangers implied by the reviews. We then developed a collaborative gating module to dynamically integrate information from strangers at the preference level based on the characteristics of the target user-item pair, effectively filtering preferences of strangers and enriching target user modeling. Finally, we applied a latent factor model to accomplish the recommendation task. Experimental results have demonstrated the superiority of our model compared to state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets from various sources.

Key words: review-based recommendation, stranger information, attention mechanism, gating mechanism