Sentiment-aware user-item recommendation combining weighted XGBoost and optimized similarity metrics

Abstract

User-item recommendation systems play a vital role in enhancing personalized digital experiences across e-commerce and social media platforms. Traditional recommendation approaches, such as collaborative filtering (CF) and content-based filtering (CBF), often suffer from challenges like data sparsity, cold-start issues, and limited contextual understanding. Sentiment-aware recommendation systems have emerged as a promising solution by incorporating emotional insights extracted from user reviews, thereby improving recommendation accuracy and personalization. This study proposes a novel sentiment-aware user-item recommendation system (SAUIRS) framework that integrates optimized term frequency inverse document frequency (O-TF-IDF), parameterized bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (P-BERT), weighted extreme gradient boosting (WXGBoost), and an optimized similarity metrics model. The optimized TF-IDF enhances feature selection, reducing dimensionality while preserving relevant textual information. P-BERT, a fine-tuned BERT model, improves sentiment classification accuracy by leveraging deep contextual embeddings. WXGBoost further refined sentiment predictions, addressing class imbalance and enhancing model robustness. The extracted sentiment information is incorporated into an optimized similarity metrics model to improve recommendation precision by aligning user preferences with sentiment-driven insights. Extensive experiments conducted on Amazon benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance in terms of accuracy, root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE) of the proposed framework compared to state-of-the-art recommendation models.