Fine-grained Sentiment-enhanced Collaborative Filtering-based Hybrid Recommender System

Abstract

Developing online educational platforms necessitates the incorporation of new intelligent procedures in order to improve long-term student experience. Presently, e-learning recommender systems rely on deep learning methods to recommend appropriate e-learning materials to the students based on their learner profiles. Fine-grained sentiment analysis (FSA) can be leveraged to enrich the recommender system. User-posted reviews and rating data are vital in accurately directing the student to the appropriate e-learning resources based on posted comments by comparable learners. In this work, a new e-learning recommendation system is proposed based on individualization and FSA. A hybrid framework is provided by integrating alternating least square (ALS) based collaborative filtering (CF) with FSA to generate an effective e-content recommendation named HCFSAR. ALS attempts to capture the learner’s latent factors based on their selections of interest to build the learner profile. Three FSA models based on attention mechanisms and bidirectional long short-term memory (bi-LSTM) are suggested and used to train twelve models in order to predict new ratings from learner-posted book reviews based on the extracted learner profile. HCFSAR used multiplication word embeddings for stronger corpus representation that were trained on a dataset generated for an educational context and showed a better accuracy of 93.39% for the best model entitled MHAM based ABHR-2 with multiplication (MHAAM), which performed better than other models. A tailored dataset that has been created by scraping reviews of different e-learning resources is leveraged to train different proposed models and validate against public datasets.