  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. 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. TransRev learns vector representations for users,
items, and reviews. The embedding of a review is learned such that (a) it
performs well as input feature of a regression model for sentiment prediction;
and (b) it always translates the reviewer embedding to the embedding of the
reviewed items. This allows TransRev to approximate a review embedding at test
time as the difference of the embedding of each item and the user embedding.
The approximated review embedding is then used with the regression model to
predict the review score for each item. TransRev outperforms state of the art
recommender systems on a large number of benchmark data sets. Moreover, it is
able to retrieve, for each user and item, the review text from the training set
whose embedding is most similar to the approximated review embedding.
