Know thy Context: Parsing Contextual Information from User Reviews for Recommendation Purposes

Bauman, Konstantin; Tuzhilin, Alexander

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3778939

Download This Paper

Open PDF in Browser

Add Paper to My Library

Know thy Context: Parsing Contextual Information from User Reviews for Recommendation Purposes

Information Systems Research (Forthcoming)

Fox School of Business Research Paper

NYU Stern School of Business Forthcoming

45 Pages Posted: 4 Feb 2021 Last revised: 3 May 2021

See all articles by Konstantin Bauman

Konstantin Bauman

Fox School of Business, Temple University

Alexander Tuzhilin

New York University (NYU) - Leonard N. Stern School of Business; New York University (NYU) - Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences

Date Written: January 1, 2021

Abstract

In this paper, we study an important problem of parsing contextual information from user reviews for recommendation purposes. First, we study the ways contextual information is expressed in user reviews and obtain novel insights about it. Among other things, we demonstrate that such type of information tends to appear at the beginning of the review, in longer sentences, in the sentences written in the past tense or using gerund form, and in the sentences referring to some points in time. Second, we propose a novel Context Parsing method for systematically extracting contextual information from user-generated reviews that relies on the insights obtained in our study. We apply the proposed method to three different Yelp applications (restaurants, hotels, and beauty & spas) and demonstrate that it works well and leads to better recommendation performance than the baseline approaches. Our method systematically extracts more comprehensive sets of relevant contextual variables and corresponding phrases than the baselines. Our analysis also shows the importance of the newly discovered contextual information for recommendation purposes. The obtained results and the proposed method can help to get more comprehensive knowledge about contextual variables in a given application that leads to better recommendations.

Keywords: recommender systems, contextual information, online reviews, context parsing

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Bauman, Konstantin and Tuzhilin, Alexander, Know thy Context: Parsing Contextual Information from User Reviews for Recommendation Purposes (January 1, 2021). Information Systems Research (Forthcoming), Fox School of Business Research Paper, NYU Stern School of Business Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3778939 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3778939