A Conceptual and Computational Framework for Aspect-Based Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems

Many datasets in E-commerce have rich information about items and users who purchase or rate them. This information can enable advanced machine learning algorithms to extract and assign user sentiments to various aspects of the items thus leading to more sophisticated and justifiable recommendations. However, most Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques rely mainly on the overall preferences of users toward items only. And there is lack of conceptual and computational framework that enables an understandable aspect-based AI approach to recommending items to users. In this paper, we propose concepts and computational tools that can sharpen the logic of recommendations and that rely on users’ sentiments along various aspects of items. These concepts include: The sentiment of a user towards a specific aspect of a specific item, the emphasis that a given user places on a specific aspect in general, the popularity and controversy of an aspect among groups of users, clusters of users emphasizing a given aspect, clusters of items that are popular among a group of users and so forth. The framework introduced in this study is developed in terms of user emphasis, aspect popularity, aspect controversy, and users and items similarity. Towards this end, we introduce the Aspect-Based Collaborative Filtering Toolbox (ABCFT), where the tools are all developed based on the three-index sentiment tensor with the indices being the user, item, and aspect. The toolbox computes solutions to the questions alluded to above. We illustrate the methodology using a hotel review dataset having around 6000 users, 400 hotels and 6 aspects.