Semantic analysis-based recommender system using sequential clustering and convolutional neural network

Accurate prediction of user preferences and generation of personalized recommendations remain as critical challenges in intelligent recommendation systems. In this study, we propose a novel recommendation model that transforms the rating prediction problem into a single-label multiclass classification task. The model integrates three key components: (1) ordered clustering information derived from user review text similarity, (2) rating rank similarity reflecting users’ behavioral tendencies, and (3) a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract semantic representations from user textual data. First, user review embeddings are clustered to capture high-level semantic preferences, where cluster indices are utilized as ordered categorical features. Second, rating rank similarity features are constructed by comparing the relative ranking of items rated by similar users. These features are fused and fed into a CNN model, which outputs a predicted rating class (e. g. , 1–5 stars) for each unobserved item, treated as a single-label classification target. To generate final Top-N recommendations, we further incorporate user-specific rating habits and item popularity to re-rank the classification outputs. The experimental results on public benchmark datasets indicate that our model substantially improves the prediction accuracy and recommendation quality compared with existing baselines. The proposed method offers a robust and interpretable approach to bridging textual review semantics, user behavior, and deep learning for rating-aware personalized recommendation.

Authors

• Yanjun Xu
• Chunqi Tian
• Wei Wang
• Lizhi Bai

Keywords

• Recommender system
• Sequential clustering
• Convolutional neural network
• Reviews and ratings
• Popularity