TransRev: Modeling Reviews as Translations from Users to Items
This work addresses the problem of improving product recommendations for users by leveraging review text and purchase data, representing an incremental advancement through integration of existing techniques.
The authors tackled the product recommendation problem by integrating recommender systems, sentiment analysis, and multi-relational learning into a joint model called TransRev, which learns vector representations for users, items, and reviews to predict review scores and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmark datasets.
The text of a review expresses the sentiment a customer has towards a particular product. This is exploited in sentiment analysis where machine learning models are used to predict the review score from the text of the review. Furthermore, the products costumers have purchased in the past are indicative of the products they will purchase in the future. This is what recommender systems exploit by learning models from purchase information to predict the items a customer might be interested in. We propose TransRev, an approach to the product recommendation problem that integrates ideas from recommender systems, sentiment analysis, and multi-relational learning into a joint learning objective. TransRev learns vector representations for users, items, and reviews. The embedding of a review is learned such that (a) it performs well as input feature of a regression model for sentiment prediction; and (b) it always translates the reviewer embedding to the embedding of the reviewed items. This allows TransRev to approximate a review embedding at test time as the difference of the embedding of each item and the user embedding. The approximated review embedding is then used with the regression model to predict the review score for each item. TransRev outperforms state of the art recommender systems on a large number of benchmark data sets. Moreover, it is able to retrieve, for each user and item, the review text from the training set whose embedding is most similar to the approximated review embedding.