Accurate and Explainable Recommendation via Hierarchical Attention Network Oriented Towards Crowd Intelligence

• Published in: Knowledge-based systems 2021-02, Vol.213, p.106687, Article 106687
• Main Authors: Yang, Chao, Zhou, Weixin, Wang, Zhiyu, Jiang, Bin, Li, Dongsheng, Shen, Huawei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Crowd intelligence; Explainable recommendation; Feature extraction; Hierarchical attention; Intelligence; Machine learning; Microprocessors; Recommender system; Representations; Review representation; State-of-the-art reviews; Text analysis
• ISSN: 0950-7051; 1872-7409
• DOI: 10.1016/j.knosys.2020.106687

Review-based recommendation algorithms can alleviate the data sparsity issue in collaborative filtering by combining user ratings and reviews in model learning. However, most existing methods simplify the feature extraction process from reviews by assuming that different granularities of information (e.g., word, review, and feature) are equally important, which cannot optimally leverage the most important information and thus achieves suboptimal recommendation accuracy. Besides, many existing works directly regard text features as users or items representations, which may not be enough to make precise representations due to the large amount of redundant information in reviews. To tackle the two problems mentioned above, we propose a deep learning-based method named Hierarchical Attention Network Oriented Towards Crowd Intelligence (HANCI). First, HANCI replaces the commonly-used topic models or CNN text processor with an RNN text processor in review feature extraction, which can fully exploit the advantages of the sequential dependencies of reviews by using the whole hidden layers of the bidirectional LSTM as outputs. Second, HANCI weighs the importance of features guided by crowd intelligence to more accurately represent each user on each item, and vice versa. Third, HANCI utilizes a hierarchical attention network based on multi-level review text analysis to extract more precise user preferences and item latent features, so that HANCI can explore the importance of words, the usefulness of reviews and the importance of features to achieve more accurate recommendation. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that HANCI outperforms the state-of-the-art review-based recommendation algorithms in accuracy and meanwhile provides insightful explanations.