Analyzing review sentiments and product images by parallel deep nets for personalized recommendation. Issue 1 (January 2023) - Zhan, Zhu
Abstract: Recommendation is an effective marketing tool widely used in the e-commerce business, and can be made based on ratings predicted from the rating data of purchased items. To improve the accuracy of rating prediction, user reviews or product images have been used separately as side information to learn the latent features of users (items). In this study, we developed a hybrid approach to analyze both user sentiments from review texts and user preferences from item images to make item recommendations more personalized for users. The hybrid model consists of two parallel modules to perform a procedure named the multiscale semantic and visual analyses (MSVA). The first module is designated to conduct semantic analysis on review documents in various aspects with word-aware and scale-aware attention mechanisms, while the second module is assigned to extract visual features with block-aware and visual-aware attention mechanisms. The MSVA model was trained, validated and tested using Amazon Product Data containing sampled reviews varying from 492, 970 to 1 million records across 22 different domains. Three state-of-the-art recommendation models were used as the baselines for performance comparisons. Averagely, MSVA reduced the mean squared error (MSE) of predicted ratings by 6.00%, 3.14% and 3.25% as opposed to the three baselines. It was demonstrated that combining semantic and visual analyses enhanced MSVA's performance across a wide variety of products, and the multiscale scheme used in both the review and visual modules of MSVA made significant contributions to the rating prediction.