Toward dual roles of users in recommender systems

Users usually play dual roles in real-world recommender systems. One is as a reviewer who writes reviews for items with rating scores, and the other is as a rater who rates the helpfulness scores of reviews. Traditional recommender systems mainly consider the reviewer role while not taking into account the rater role. However, the rater role allows users to express their opinions toward reviews about items; hence it may indirectly indicate their opinions about items, which could be complementary to the reviewer role. Since most real-world recommender systems provide convenient mechanisms for the rater role, recent studies show that typically there are much more helpfulness ratings from the rater role than item ratings from the reviewer role. Therefore, incorporating the rater role of users may have the potentials to mitigate the data sparsity and cold-start problems in traditional recommender systems. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit dual roles of users in recommender systems. In particular, we provide a principled way to exploit the rater role mathematically and propose a novel recommender system DualRec, which captures both the reviewer role and the rater role of users simultaneously for recommendation. Experimental results on two real world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, and further experiments are conducted to understand the importance of the rater role of users in recommendation.