SOAR: Social and Opinion-Aware Recommendations

Giannis Christoforidis, Apostolos N. Papadopoulos

One of the enduring challenges in online platforms is recommendation. Both communities and advertisers face difficulties in analyzing complex user behavior, identifying habits and evolving preferences, and providing timely recommendations that are relevant to user interests. In particular, point of interest recommendation poses the additional challenge of identifying the factors that influence user behavior, capturing user tendencies, and generating accurate, personalized recommendations for each individual. In this work, we propose SOAR, a Social and Opinion Aware Recommendation model that incorporates both the user's friendship network and textual reviews to assess whether a location is suitable for a specific user, with a particular emphasis on the sentiment of shared reviews. Experimental results in real-world datasets demonstrate that incorporating reviews into the recommendation process improves the precision of the recommendation.