Recommendation for new users with partial preferences by integrating product reviews with static specifications

Recommending products to new buyers is an important problem for online shopping services, since there are always new buyers joining a deployed system. In some recommender systems, a new buyer will be asked to indicate her/his preferences on some attributes of the product (like camera) in order to address the so called cold-start problem. Such collected preferences are usually not complete due to the user's cognitive limitation and/or unfamiliarity with the product domain, which are called partial preferences. The fundamental challenge of recommendation is thus that it may be difficult to accurately and reliably find some like-minded users via collaborative filtering techniques or match inherently preferred products with content-based methods. In this paper, we propose to leverage some auxiliary data of online reviewers' aspect-level opinions, so as to predict the buyer's missing preferences. The resulted user preferences are likely to be more accurate and complete. Experiment on a real user-study data and a crawled Amazon review data shows that our solution achieves better recommendation performance than several baseline methods.