Multilingual Review-aware Deep Recommender System via Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

With the dramatic expansion of international markets, consumers write reviews in different languages, which poses a new challenge for Recommender Systems (RSs) dealing with this increasing amount of multilingual information. Recent studies that leverage deep-learning techniques for review-aware RSs have demonstrated their effectiveness in modelling fine-grained user-item interactions through the aspects of reviews. However, most of these models can neither take full advantage of the contextual information from multilingual reviews nor discriminate the inherent ambiguity of words originated from the user’s different tendency in writing. To this end, we propose a novel Multilingual Review-aware Deep Recommendation Model (MrRec) for rating prediction tasks. MrRec mainly consists of two parts: (1) Multilingual aspect-based sentiment analysis module (MABSA), which aims to jointly extract aligned aspects and their associated sentiments in different languages simultaneously with only requiring overall review ratings. (2) Multilingual recommendation module that learns aspect importances of both the user and item with considering different contributions of multiple languages and estimates aspect utility via a dual interactive attention mechanism integrated with aspect-specific sentiments from MABSA. Finally, overall ratings can be inferred by a prediction layer adopting the aspect utility value and aspect importance as inputs. Extensive experimental results on nine real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance and interpretability of our model.