  In recent years, many studies extract aspects from user reviews and integrate
them with ratings for improving the recommendation performance. The common
aspects mentioned in a user's reviews and a product's reviews indicate indirect
connections between the user and product. However, these aspect-based methods
suffer from two problems. First, the common aspects are usually very sparse,
which is caused by the sparsity of user-product interactions and the diversity
of individual users' vocabularies. Second, a user's interests on aspects could
be different with respect to different products, which are usually assumed to
be static in existing methods. In this paper, we propose an Attentive
Aspect-based Recommendation Model (AARM) to tackle these challenges. For the
first problem, to enrich the aspect connections between user and product,
besides common aspects, AARM also models the interactions between synonymous
and similar aspects. For the second problem, a neural attention network which
simultaneously considers user, product and aspect information is constructed to
capture a user's attention towards aspects when examining different products.
Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that AARM can
effectively alleviate the two aforementioned problems and significantly
outperforms several state-of-the-art recommendation methods on top-N
recommendation task.
