Combining user preferences and user opinions for accurate recommendation

Recommendation systems represent a popular research area with a variety of applications. Such systems provide personalized services to the user and help address the problem of information overload. Traditional recommendation methods such as collaborative filtering suffer from low accuracy because of data sparseness though. We propose a novel recommendation algorithm based on analysis of an online review. The algorithm incorporates two new methods for opinion mining and recommendation. As opposed to traditional methods, which are usually based on the similarity of ratings to infer user preferences, the proposed recommendation method analyzes the difference between the ratings and opinions of the user to identify the user’s preferences. This method considers explicit ratings and implicit opinions, an action that can address the problem of data sparseness. We propose a new feature and opinion extraction method based on the characteristics of online reviews to extract effectively the opinion of the user from a customer review written in Chinese. Based on these methods, we also conduct an empirical study of online restaurant customer reviews to create a restaurant recommendation system and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.