A Collaborative Filtering System Combined with Users' Review Mining : Application to the Recommendation of Smartphone Apps

Collaborative filtering(CF) algorithm has been popularly used for recommender systems in both academic and practical applications. A general CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and creates recommendation results with the items favored by other people with similar tastes. Thus, it is very important for CF to measure the similarities between users because the recommendation quality depends on it. In most cases, users' explicit numeric ratings of items(i.e. quantitative information) have only been used to calculate the similarities between users in CF. However, several studies indicated that qualitative information such as user's reviews on the items may contribute to measure these similarities more accurately. Considering that a lot of people are likely to share their honest opinion on the items they purchased recently due to the advent of the Web 2.0, user's reviews can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, this study proposes a new hybrid recommender system that combines with users' review mining. Our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and his/her text reviews on the items when calculating similarities between users. In specific, our system creates not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-item review term matrix. Then, it calculates rating similarity and review similarity from each matrix, and calculates the final user-to-user similarity based on these two similarities(i.e. rating and review similarities). As the methods for calculating review similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is to use the frequency of the commonly used terms, and the other one is to use the sum of the importance weights of the commonly used terms in users' review. In the case of the importance weights of terms, we proposed the use of average TF-IDF(Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) weights. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we applied it to the implementation of a recommender system for smartphone applications (hereafter, app). At present, over a million apps are offered in each app stores operated by Google and Apple. Due to this information overload, users have difficulty in selecting proper apps that they really want. Furthermore, app store operators like Google and Apple have cumulated huge amount of users' reviews on apps until now. Thus, we chose smartphone app stores as the application domain of our system. In order to collect the experimental data set, we built and operated a Web-based data collection system for about two weeks. As a result, we could obtain 1,246 valid responses(ratings and reviews) from 78 users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications(VBA) and SAS Text Miner. And, to avoid distortion due to human intervention, we did not adopt any refining works by human during the user's review mining process. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared its performance to the performance of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using average MAE(mean absolute error). The experimental results showed that our proposed system(MAE = 0.7867 ~ 0.7881) slightly outperformed a conventional CF system(MAE = 0.7939). Also, they showed that the calculation of review similarity between users based on the TF-IDF weights(MAE = 0.7867) leaded to better recommendation accuracy than the calculation based on the frequency of the commonly used terms in reviews(MAE = 0.7881). The results from paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system with review similarity calculation using the frequency of the commonly used terms outperformed conventional CF system with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of users' review information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

사용자 리뷰 마이닝을 결합한 협업 필터링 시스템: 스마트폰 앱 추천에의 응용

협업 필터링은 학계나 산업계에서 우수한 성능으로 인해 많이 사용되는 추천기법이지만, 정량적 정보인 사용자들의 평가점수에만 국한하여 추천결과를 생성하므로 간혹 정확도가 떨어지는 문제가 발생한다. 이에 새로운 정보를 추가로 고려하여, 협업 필터링의 성능을 개선하려는 연구들이 지금까지 다양하게 시도되어 왔다. 본 연구는 최근 Web 2.0 시대의 도래로 인해 사용자들이 구입한 상품에 대한 솔직한 의견을 인터넷 상에 자유롭게 표현한다는 점에 착안하여, 사용자가 직접 작성한 리뷰를 참고하여 협업 필터링의 성능을 개선하는 새로운 추천 알고리즘을 제안하고, 이를 스마트폰 앱 추천 시스템에 적용하였다. 정성 정보인 사용자 리뷰를 정량화하기 위해 본 연구에서는 텍스트 마이닝을 활용하였다. 구체적으로 본 연구의 추천시스템은 사용자간 유사도를 산출할 때, 사용자 리뷰의 유사도를 추가로 반영하여 보다 정밀하게 사용자간 유사도를 산출할 수 있도록 하였다. 이 때, 사용자 리뷰의 유사도를 산출하는 접근법으로 중복 사용된 색인어의 빈도로 산출하는 방안과 TF-IDF(Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) 가중치 합으로 산출하는 2가지 방안을 제시한 뒤 그 성능을 비교해 보았다. 실험결과, 제안 알고리즘을 통한 추천, 즉 사용자 리뷰의 유사도를 추가로 반영하는 알고리즘이 평점만을 고려하는 전통적인 협업 필터링과 비교해 더 우수한 예측정확도를 나타냄을 확인할 수 있었다. 아울러, 중복 사용 단어의 TF-IDF 가중치의 합을 고려했을 때, 단순히 중복 사용 단어의 빈도만을 고려했을 때 보다 조금 더 나은 예측정확도를 얻을 수 있음도 함께 확인할 수 있었다.