Sentiment-Aware Recommendation Systems in E-Commerce: A Review from a Natural Language Processing Perspective
It addresses the problem of e-commerce platforms overlooking nuanced opinions in user feedback for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it is a review paper.
This paper reviews sentiment-aware recommendation systems in e-commerce from a natural language processing perspective, covering advancements from 2023 to early 2025 and highlighting how integrating sentiment analysis can enhance prediction accuracy and explainability.
E-commerce platforms generate vast volumes of user feedback, such as star ratings, written reviews, and comments. However, most recommendation engines rely primarily on numerical scores, often overlooking the nuanced opinions embedded in free text. This paper comprehensively reviews sentiment-aware recommendation systems from a natural language processing perspective, covering advancements from 2023 to early 2025. It highlights the benefits of integrating sentiment analysis into e-commerce recommenders to enhance prediction accuracy and explainability through detailed opinion extraction. Our survey categorizes recent work into four main approaches: deep learning classifiers that combine sentiment embeddings with user item interactions, transformer based methods for nuanced feature extraction, graph neural networks that propagate sentiment signals, and conversational recommenders that adapt in real time to user feedback. We summarize model architectures and demonstrate how sentiment flows through recommendation pipelines, impacting dialogue-based suggestions. Key challenges include handling noisy or sarcastic text, dynamic user preferences, and bias mitigation. Finally, we outline research gaps and provide a roadmap for developing smarter, fairer, and more user-centric recommendation tools.