Leveraging User Comments for Recommendation in E-Commerce

Abstract

Collaborative filtering recommender systems traditionally recommend products to users solely based on the given user-item rating matrix. Two main issues, data sparsity and scalability, have long been concerns. In our previous work, an approach was proposed to address the scalability issue by clustering the products using the content of the user-item rating matrix. However, it still suffers from these concerns. In this paper, we improve the approach by employing user comments to address the issues of data sparsity and scalability. Word2Vec is applied to produce item vectors, one item vector for each product, from the comments made by users on their previously bought goods. Through the user-item rating matrix, the user vectors of all the customers are produced. By clustering, products and users are partitioned into item groups and user groups, respectively. Based on these groups, recommendations to a user can be made. Experimental results show that both the inaccuracy caused by a sparse user-item rating matrix and the inefficiency due to an enormous amount of data can be much alleviated.

Keywords

• collaborative filtering
• user-item rating matrix
• data sparsity
• scalability
• Word2Vec
• self-constructing clustering