A Hybrid Recommender System for Rating Prediction of Arabic Reviews

Abstract

Recommender systems nowadays are playing an important role in the delivery of services and information to users. Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) is the process of determining the attitude of textual opinions, whether they are positive, negative or neutral. Data sparsity is representing a big issue for recommender systems because of the insufficiency of user rating or absence of data about users or items. This research proposed a hybrid approach combining sentiment analysis and recommender systems to tackle the problem of data sparsity problems by predicting the rating of products from users’ reviews using text mining and NLP techniques. This research focuses especially on Arabic reviews, where the model is evaluated using Opinion Corpus for Arabic (OCA) dataset. Our system was efficient, and it showed a good accuracy of nearly 85% in predicting the rating from reviews.