Collaborative Multi-Level Embedding Learning from Reviews for Rating Prediction

We investigate the problem of personalized review-based rating prediction which aims at predicting users' ratings for items that they have not evaluated by using their historical reviews and ratings. Most of existing methods solve this problem by integrating topic model and latent factor model to learn interpretable user and items factors. However, these methods cannot utilize word local context information of reviews. Moreover, it simply restricts user and item representations equivalent to their review representations, which may bring some irrelevant information in review text and harm the accuracy of rating prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel Collaborative Multi-Level Embedding (CMLE) model to address these limitations. The main technical contribution of CMLE is to integrate word embedding model with standard matrix factorization model through a projection level. This allows CMLE to inherit the ability of capturing word local context information from word embedding model and relax the strict equivalence requirement by projecting review embedding to user and item embeddings. A joint optimization problem is formulated and solved through an efficient stochastic gradient ascent algorithm. Empirical evaluations on real datasets show CMLE outperforms several competitive methods and can solve the two limitations well.