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arXiv · 2608.26728

Beyond a Single Story: Meta-Reviewing Sparse and Incomplete User-generated Contents for Recommendation

Hongren Wang·Tianjun Wei·Yingpeng Du·Jie Zhang·Yin-Leng Theng
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Abstract

Data sparsity remains a long-standing challenge in recommender systems, and it becomes more severe for methods relying on user-generated content (UGC) such as textual reviews, which capture fine-grained preferences but require more user efforts to produce. As a result, UGC exhibits (1) missing reviews, where interactions lack any review, and (2) incomplete reviews, where available reviews cover only a subset of relevant attributes. Existing approaches often overlook these UGC-specific issues, leading to degraded accuracy. Motivated by meta-review in academic peer review, we propose MOSAIC (Meta-review On Sparse And Incomplete user-generated Content), which constructs a meta-review for each target user by aggregating attribute-sentiment evidence from neighbor users' reviews. A multi-gate mixture-of-experts (MMoE) architecture jointly optimizes rating prediction and meta-review attribute-sentiment prediction, while an attention module personalizes the aggregated meta-review signals to each target user, yielding both refined rating predictions and attribute-level explanations. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that MOSAIC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both recommendation accuracy and explanation quality, mitigating UGC sparsity and incompleteness while delivering consistent gains for users with limited interaction history.

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Hongren Wang, Tianjun Wei, Yingpeng Du, Jie Zhang, Yin-Leng Theng. 2026-08-27. Beyond a Single Story: Meta-Reviewing Sparse and Incomplete User-generated Contents for Recommendation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26728

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