Review-Aware Recommendation Based on Polarity and Temporality

Review-aware recommendation systems aim to enhance recommendation performance by leveraging user reviews and their associated attributes to model user preferences. However, most existing methods fail to address two critical challenges introduced by user reviews: polarity bias and temporal dynamics. Polarity bias refers to inconsistencies between a user’s numerical ratings and the sentiment expressed in their reviews—for example, a user might give a restaurant a high rating while writing a negative review. In addition, user preferences may evolve over time, as individuals can review the same item on multiple occasions. To address these issues, we propose RARPT, a review-aware recommendation framework that jointly models polarity and temporality. Specifically, we process positive and negative reviews separately and employ a sequential model to capture the temporal evolution of user preferences. We also introduce a polarity balance module, which uses a cross-attention mechanism to generate supplementary collaborative vectors from reviews of the opposite polarity, thereby mitigating both quantitative and relational imbalances. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets from Amazon and Yelp. The results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, our model offers enhanced interpretability, helping deliver more effective personalized recommendations.