TransRev : Modeling Reviews as Translations from Users to Items

The text of a review expresses the sentiment a customer has towards a particular product. This is exploited in sentiment analysis where machine learning models are used to predict the review score from the text of the review. Furthermore, the products costumers have purchased in the past are indicative of the products they will purchase in the future. This is what recommender systems exploit by learning models from purchase information to predict the items a customer might be interested in. The underlying structure of this problem setting is a bipartite graph, wherein customer nodes are connected to product nodes via ‘review’ links. This is reminiscent of knowledge bases, with ‘review’ links replacing relation types. We propose TransRev, an approach to the product recommendation problem that integrates ideas from recommender systems, sentiment analysis, and multi-relational learning into a joint learning objective.