Enhancing Review-Based Recommendations Through Local and Global Feature Fusion

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of information and communication technology, the number of items users encounter increased exponentially. Consequently, the importance of recommendation systems emerged to reduce the time and effort required for users to make item selections. Recently, among various studies on recommendation systems, there has been significant interest in leveraging review text as auxiliary information. This study proposes a novel model to enhance recommendation performance by effectively analyzing review texts through the fusion of local and global features. By combining convolutional neural networks (CNN), which excel in extracting local features, and the RoBERTa model, renowned for capturing global contextual features, the proposed approach effectively uncovers users’ latent preferences embedded within review texts. The proposed model comprises three key components: the user–item interaction module, which learns complex interactions between users and items; the feature extraction module, which extracts both local and global features using CNN and RoBERTa; and the preference prediction module, which combines the output vectors from the previous modules to predict user preferences for specific items. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets collected from Amazon platform demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms baseline models. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach in considering both local and global features for extracting user preferences from review texts.