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A review-aware multi-modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system

Online shopping has become a ubiquitous aspect of modern life and recommender systems have become a crucial tool for e-commerce giants to efficiently sift through vast amounts of data to locate the infor mation that users are seeking. Within e-commerce, recommender systems aim to provide users with...

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Main Author: Singh, Pavan
Other Authors: Durbach, Ian
Format: Thesis
Language:English
English
Published: Department of Statistical Sciences 2025
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access_status_str Open Access
author Singh, Pavan
author2 Durbach, Ian
author_browse Durbach, Ian
Singh, Pavan
author_facet Durbach, Ian
Singh, Pavan
author_sort Singh, Pavan
collection Thesis
description Online shopping has become a ubiquitous aspect of modern life and recommender systems have become a crucial tool for e-commerce giants to efficiently sift through vast amounts of data to locate the infor mation that users are seeking. Within e-commerce, recommender systems aim to provide users with personalised product recommendations based on their preferences and behaviours. They analyse user data, for example their browsing history, purchase history, and ratings to understand their preferences and make recommendations that align with these preferences. They have become fundamental for information retrieval and provide a particularly lucrative landscape for e-commerce platforms, providing suggestions that effectively prune large information spaces so that users are directed toward those items that best meet their needs and preferences. This thesis looks at developing a neural collaborative filtering (NCF) recommender system model which incorporates data from multi-modalities, textual data and explicit ratings data (and review sentiment). The primary objectives of this study are twofold. Firstly, the aim is to create and assess the efficacy of the, relatively new, deep learning-based collaborative filtering approach - NCF - in comparison to other more traditional collaborative filtering models, commonly used. Secondly, the study seeks to investigate the potential impact of incorporating product review text and review text sentiment in improving the accuracy of recommendations. Our model shall be trained and evaluated on the Amazon Product Reviews dataset, which contains millions of user reviews and feedback on thousands of different products across different categories. The metrics used to evaluate the model include predictive accuracy metrics such as mean absolute error, amongst others, as well as top-n evaluation metrics such as recall@n and precision@n. Our methodology is based on a literature analysis and aims to clearly extrapolate on the recent works which have established a framework for NCF. The results of our study show that the NCF model outperforms all the benchmark models in terms of predictive accuracy and top-n evaluation. The results also show that the inclusion of review text in the NCF model improves the predictive accuracy of the model significantly. The results of this study are significant as they demonstrate the potential benefits of incorporating review text into deep learning-based approaches for collaborative filtering for improved rating prediction.
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institution University of Cape Town (South Africa)
language English
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last_indexed 2026-06-10T12:31:30.019Z
license_str Not specified — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
publishDate 2025
publishDateRange 2025
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spelling oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/41341 A review-aware multi-modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system Singh, Pavan Durbach, Ian Clark Allan E statistical science Online shopping has become a ubiquitous aspect of modern life and recommender systems have become a crucial tool for e-commerce giants to efficiently sift through vast amounts of data to locate the infor mation that users are seeking. Within e-commerce, recommender systems aim to provide users with personalised product recommendations based on their preferences and behaviours. They analyse user data, for example their browsing history, purchase history, and ratings to understand their preferences and make recommendations that align with these preferences. They have become fundamental for information retrieval and provide a particularly lucrative landscape for e-commerce platforms, providing suggestions that effectively prune large information spaces so that users are directed toward those items that best meet their needs and preferences. This thesis looks at developing a neural collaborative filtering (NCF) recommender system model which incorporates data from multi-modalities, textual data and explicit ratings data (and review sentiment). The primary objectives of this study are twofold. Firstly, the aim is to create and assess the efficacy of the, relatively new, deep learning-based collaborative filtering approach - NCF - in comparison to other more traditional collaborative filtering models, commonly used. Secondly, the study seeks to investigate the potential impact of incorporating product review text and review text sentiment in improving the accuracy of recommendations. Our model shall be trained and evaluated on the Amazon Product Reviews dataset, which contains millions of user reviews and feedback on thousands of different products across different categories. The metrics used to evaluate the model include predictive accuracy metrics such as mean absolute error, amongst others, as well as top-n evaluation metrics such as recall@n and precision@n. Our methodology is based on a literature analysis and aims to clearly extrapolate on the recent works which have established a framework for NCF. The results of our study show that the NCF model outperforms all the benchmark models in terms of predictive accuracy and top-n evaluation. The results also show that the inclusion of review text in the NCF model improves the predictive accuracy of the model significantly. The results of this study are significant as they demonstrate the potential benefits of incorporating review text into deep learning-based approaches for collaborative filtering for improved rating prediction. 2025-04-03T10:47:30Z 2025-04-03T10:47:30Z 2024 2025-04-03T10:39:03Z Thesis / Dissertation Masters MSc http://hdl.handle.net/11427/41341 en eng application/pdf Department of Statistical Sciences Faculty of Science University of Cape Town
spellingShingle statistical science
Singh, Pavan
A review-aware multi-modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system
thesis_degree_str Master's
title A review-aware multi-modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system
title_full A review-aware multi-modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system
title_fullStr A review-aware multi-modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system
title_full_unstemmed A review-aware multi-modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system
title_short A review-aware multi-modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system
title_sort review aware multi modal neural collaborative filtering recommender system
topic statistical science
url http://hdl.handle.net/11427/41341
work_keys_str_mv AT singhpavan areviewawaremultimodalneuralcollaborativefilteringrecommendersystem
AT singhpavan reviewawaremultimodalneuralcollaborativefilteringrecommendersystem