Abstract
Recommender systems have attracted attention in both the academic and the business areas. They aim to give users more intelligent methods for navigating and identifying complex information spaces, especially in e-commerce domain. However, these systems still have to overcome certain limitations that reduce their performance, such as overspecialization of recommendations, cold-start, and difficulties when items with unequal probability distribution exist. A novel approach addresses the above issues through a case-based recommendation methodology which is a form of content-based recommendation that is well suited to many product recommendation domains, owing to the clear organization of users' needs and preferences. Unfortunately, the experience-based roots of case-based reasoning are not clearly reflected in case-based recommenders. In other words, the concept that product cases, which are usually fixed feature-based tuples, are experiential is not adopted well in case-based recommenders. To solve this problem as well as the recommenders' rating sparsity issue, one can use product reviews which are generated from users' experience with the product a basis of product information. Our approach adapts the use of sentiment scores along with feature similarity throughout the recommendation unlike traditional case-based recommender systems, which tend to depend entirely on pure similarity-based approaches. This paper models product cases with the products' features and sentiment scores at the feature level and product level. Thus, combining user experience and similarity measures improves the recommender performance and gives users more flexibility to choose whether they prefer products more similar to their query or better qualified products. We present the results using different evaluation methods for different case structures, different numbers of similar cases retrieved and multilevel sentiment-approaches. The recommender performance was highly improved with the use of feature-level sentiment approach, which recommends product cases that are similar to the query but favored for customers.