Cross-lingual Product Recommendation System Using Collaborative Filtering

抄録

We developed a cross-lingual recommender system using collaborative filtering with English-Japanese translation pairs of product names to help non-Japanese buyers who speak English when they are visiting Japanese shopping websites. Customer purchase histories at an English shopping site and those at another Japanese shopping site were used for the experiments. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the system. They were (1) two-fold cross validation where half of the translation pairs were masked and (2) experiments where all of the translation pairs were used. The precisions, recalls, and mean reciprocal ranks (MRRs) of the system were evaluated to assess the general performance of the recommender system in the first set of experiments. We investigated the effect formatting the translation pairs and the performance according to the type of feature value of the vectors (binary versus rating values). In contrast, the kind of items that were recommended in a more realistic scenario were shown in the second experiment. The results reveal that masked items were found more efficiently than when the bestseller recommender system was used and, further, that items only on the Japanese site that seemed to be related to the buyers’ interests could be found by the system in the more realistic scenario.