Implicit Feedback Recommendation Method Based on User-Generated Content

Abstract

Studying recommendation method has long been a fundamental area in personalized marketing science. The rating data sparsity problem is the biggest challenge of recommendations. In addition, existing recommendation methods can only identify user preferences rather than customer needs. To solve these two bottleneck problems, we propose a novel implicit feedback recommendation method using user-generated content (UGC). We identify product feature and customer needs from UGC using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model and textual semantic analysis techniques, measure user-product fit degree introducing attention mechanism and antonym mechanism, and predict user rating based on user-product fit degree and user history rating data. Using data from a large-scale review sites, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our study makes several research contributions. First, we propose a novel recommendation method with strong robustness against sparse rating data. Second, we propose a novel recommendation method based on the customer need-product feature fit. Third, we propose a novel approach to measure the fit degree of customer needs-product feature, which can effectively improve the performance of recommendation method. Our study also indicates the following findings: (1) UGC can be used to predict user ratings with no user rating records. This finding has important implications to solve the sparsity problem of recommendations thoroughly. (2) The customer need-based recommendation method has better performance than existing user preference-based recommendation methods. This finding sheds light on the necessity of mining customer need for recommendation methods. (3) UGC can be used to mine customer need and product features. This finding indicates that UGC also can be used in the other studies requiring information about customer need and product feature. (4) Comparing the opinions of user review should not be solely on the basis of semantic similarity. This finding sheds light on the limitation of existing opinion mining studies.