The frequent user interactions happening in the form of textual contents like reviews, ratings, tags, blogs, testimonials, and so forth transformed the social media platform into a contextualized and personalized data warehouse focusing its users' unique likes and dislikes. The huge volume of social media content makes it difficult for the end users to consume relevant information by themselves. The need of a tool to deal with such scenario leads to the development of recommendation systems. This work proposes an ensemble multi-stage recommender system with sentiment based clustering to deal with social media text corpus where each stage performing unique functionalities of information retrieval, natural language processing, user segmentation, prediction, and recommendation generation. The proposed system leverages a hybrid approach of content-based, collaborative, and demographic filtering techniques to predict and recommend contents, products, or services according to user interests. The experimental results gathered using standard datasets are promising and found more efficient than the traditional approaches.
K E Y W O R D Scollaborative filtering, content-based filtering, machine learning, natural language processing, recommender system, social media
INTRODUCTIONData scientists uncover an emerging trend in the availability of information for solving various business problems using data analytics. One of the key reasons for the exponential growth of information availability and accessibility is the expansion of internet followed by the emergence of digital platforms like e-commerce as popular mode of transactions. Another important reason is the evolution of social media as a channel for various types of user interactions. The retrieval of relevant information and its presentation to the target audience in an appropriate way has become highly important as information availability is no longer a challenge. Recommender systems are evolved as a tool to bridge the gaps among information extraction, information filtering, information processing, and presentation to end user.Recommender system is a type of information filtering technique used for predicting the potential behavior of a user by processing variety of information like past behavior traits, societal activities, contextual information, personal preferences, and so forth. In end user perspective, recommender systems help them to retrieve the right information so that considerable time can be saved in searching for relevant and accurate information. 1 Recommender systems and its applications are now becoming very popular across almost all business/industrial domains like e-commerce, 2 travel and tourism, 3-7 customer retention, 8-11 fraud detection, 12,13 advertisement, 14,15 and so forth.Currently, the vast majority of social media data is residing in the form of textual content like reviews, blog posts, forum updates, testimonials, and so forth. For example, applications like Amazon.com, Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Facebook, Twitter, and so forth, pr...