Improving collaborative filtering using lexicon-based sentiment analysis

Abstract

Since data is available increasingly on the Internet, efforts are needed to develop and improve recommender systems to produce a list of possible favorite items. In this paper, we expand our work to enhance the accuracy of Arabic collaborative filtering by applying sentiment analysis to user reviews, we also addressed major problems of the current work by applying effective techniques to handle the scalability and sparsity problems. The proposed approach consists of two phases: the sentiment analysis and the recommendation phase. The sentiment analysis phase estimates sentiment scores using a special lexicon for the Arabic dataset. The item-based and singular value decomposition-based collaborative filtering are used in the second phase. Overall, our proposed approach improves the experiments’ results by reducing average of mean absolute and root mean squared errors using a large Arabic dataset consisting of 63,000 book reviews.