As the e-commerce market grows worldwide, personalized recommendation services have become essential to users’ personalized items or services. They can decrease the cost of user information exploration and have a positive impact on corporate sales growth. Recently, many studies have been actively conducted using reviews written by users to address traditional recommender system research problems. However, reviews can include content that is not conducive to purchasing decisions, such as advertising, false reviews, or fake reviews. Using such reviews to provide recommendation services can lower the recommendation performance as well as a trust in the company. This study proposes a novel review of the helpfulness-based recommendation methodology (RHRM) framework to support users’ purchasing decisions in personalized recommendation services. The core of our framework is a review semantics extractor and a user/item recommendation generator. The review semantics extractor learns reviews representations in a convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory hybrid neural network for review helpfulness classification. The user/item recommendation generator models the user’s preference on items based on their past interactions. Here, past interactions indicate only records in which the user-written reviews of items are helpful. Since many reviews do not have helpfulness scores, we first propose a helpfulness classification model to reflect the review helpfulness that significantly impacts users’ purchasing decisions in personalized recommendation services. The helpfulness classification model is trained about limited reviews utilizing helpfulness scores. Several experiments with the Amazon dataset show that if review helpfulness information is used in the recommender system, performance such as the accuracy of personalized recommendation service can be further improved, thereby enhancing user satisfaction and further increasing trust in the company.

With the continuous growth in the Home Meal Replacement (HMR) market, the significance of recommender systems has been raised for effectively recommending customized HMR products to each customer. The extant literature has mainly focused on enhancing the performance of recommender systems based on offline evaluations of customers’ past purchase records. However, since the existing offline evaluation methods evaluate the consistency of products on the recommendation list with ones purchased by customers from the test dataset, they are incapable of encompassing components such as serendipity and novelty that are also crucial in recommendation. Moreover, the existing offline evaluation methods cannot measure rewards such as discount coupons that may play a vital role in strengthening customers’ desire for purchase and thereby stimulating their purchase with a provision of a recommendation list. In this study, we used an SOR model to verify the effect of personalized recommendation stimulus on a customer’s response in an actual online environment. The results indicate that the customers’ response rate was higher with a provision of personalized recommendations than that of bestseller recommendations, and higher when being offered with cash discounts than earning redeemable points. Meanwhile, the response rate to the recommendation with higher volumes of rewards was not as high as expected, while the point pressure mechanism did not work either.

Online reviews that consist of texts and images are an essential source of information for alleviating data sparsity in recommender system studies. Although texts and images provide different types of information, they can provide complementary or substitutive advantages. However, most studies are limited in introducing the complementary effect between texts and images in the recommender systems. Specifically, they have overlooked the informational value of images and proposed recommender systems solely based on textual representations. To address this research gap, this study proposes a novel recommender model that captures the dependence between texts and images. This study uses the RoBERTa and VGG-16 models to extract textual and visual information from online reviews and applies a co-attention mechanism to capture the complementarity between the two modalities. Extensive experiments were conducted using Amazon datasets, confirming the superiority of the proposed model. Our findings suggest that the complementarity of texts and images is crucial for enhancing recommendation accuracy and performance.

Purpose: The existing collaborative filtering algorithm may select an insufficiently representative customer as the neighbor of a target customer, which means that the performance in providing recommendations is not sufficiently accurate. This study aims to investigate the impact on recommendation performance of selecting influential and representative customers.Design/methodology/approach: Some studies have shown that review helpfulness and consistency significantly affect purchase decision-making. Thus, this study focuses on customers who have written helpful and consistent reviews to select influential and representative neighbors. To achieve the purpose of this study, the authors apply a text-mining approach to analyze review helpfulness and consistency. In addition, they evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology using several real-world Amazon review data sets for experimental utility and reliability.Findings: This study is the first to propose a methodology to investigate the effect of review consistency and helpfulness on recommendation performance. The experimental results confirmed that the recommendation performance was excellent when a neighbor was selected who wrote consistent or helpful reviews more than when neighbors were selected for all customers.Originality/value: This study investigates the effect of review consistency and helpfulness on recommendation performance. Online review can enhance recommendation performance because it reflects the purchasing behavior of customers who consider reviews when purchasing items. The experimental results indicate that review helpfulness and consistency can enhance the performance of personalized recommendation services, increase customer satisfaction and increase confidence in a company.

With the rapid advancement of information and communication technology, the number of items users encounter increased exponentially. Consequently, the importance of recommendation systems emerged to reduce the time and effort required for users to make item selections. Recently, among various studies on recommendation systems, there has been significant interest in leveraging review text as auxiliary information. This study proposes a novel model to enhance recommendation performance by effectively analyzing review texts through the fusion of local and global features. By combining convolutional neural networks (CNN), which excel in extracting local features, and the RoBERTa model, renowned for capturing global contextual features, the proposed approach effectively uncovers users’ latent preferences embedded within review texts. The proposed model comprises three key components: the user–item interaction module, which learns complex interactions between users and items; the feature extraction module, which extracts both local and global features using CNN and RoBERTa; and the preference prediction module, which combines the output vectors from the previous modules to predict user preferences for specific items. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets collected from Amazon platform demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms baseline models. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach in considering both local and global features for extracting user preferences from review texts.