  Current recommender systems exploit user and item similarities by
collaborative filtering. Some advanced methods also consider the temporal
evolution of item ratings as a global background process. However, all prior
methods disregard the individual evolution of a user's experience level and how
this is expressed in the user's writing in a review community. In this paper,
we model the joint evolution of user experience, interest in specific item
facets, writing style, and rating behavior. This way we can generate individual
recommendations that take into account the user's maturity level (e.g.,
recommending art movies rather than blockbusters for a cinematography expert).
As only item ratings and review texts are observables, we capture the user's
experience and interests in a latent model learned from her reviews, vocabulary
and writing style. We develop a generative HMM-LDA model to trace user
evolution, where the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) traces her latent experience
progressing over time -- with solely user reviews and ratings as observables
over time. The facets of a user's interest are drawn from a Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA) model derived from her reviews, as a function of her (again
latent) experience level. In experiments with five real-world datasets, we show
that our model improves the rating prediction over state-of-the-art baselines,
by a substantial margin. We also show, in a use-case study, that our model
performs well in the assessment of user experience levels.
