Coupled matrix factorization and topic modeling for aspect mining

Aspect mining, which aims to extract ad hoc aspects from online reviews and predict rating or opinion on each aspect, can satisfy the personalized needs for evaluation of specific aspect on product quality. Recently, with the increase of related research, how to effectively integrate rating and review information has become the key issue for addressing this problem. Considering that matrix factorization is an effective tool for rating prediction and topic modeling is widely used for review processing, it is a natural idea to combine matrix factorization and topic modeling for aspect mining (or called aspect rating prediction). However, this idea faces several challenges on how to address suitable sharing factors, scale mismatch, and dependency relation of rating and review information. In this paper, we propose a novel model to effectively integrate Matrix factorization and Topic modeling for Aspect rating prediction (MaToAsp). To overcome the above challenges and ensure the performance, MaToAsp employs items as the sharing factors to combine matrix factorization and topic modeling, and introduces an interpretive preference probability to eliminate scale mismatch. In the hybrid model, we establish a dependency relation from ratings to sentiment terms in phrases. The experiments on two real datasets including Chinese Dianping and English Tripadvisor prove that MaToAsp not only obtains reasonable aspect identification but also achieves the best aspect rating prediction performance, compared to recent representative baselines.