本 科 生 毕 业 论 文 正 文

Dissertation for Bachelor's Student

（ 2024 届）

THESIS
Movie Recommender System
TITLE

STUDENT STUDENT
NAME El-araby Yassine 亚亚 ID 2020992111018

2020
MAJOR Big Data Technology CLASS
MENTOR Fanran 亚亚亚亚 TITLE

信息科学与技术学院
 HANGZHOU NORMAL UNIVERSITY TH Movie Recommender System

CONTENT BASED FILTERING MOVIE

RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM

ABSTRACT

The multitude of online media services and content platforms that have been developed makes it
harder for the viewers to find new movies and TV shows as well as other video content, which completes
their needs. This growing number of available options has highlighted the role of the personalized
recommendation systems which are supported by advanced techniques and theories to precisely propose
personalized movie recommendations to each user. This work is devoted to the detailed investigation of a
new content-based movie recommender system design approach which integrates sentiment analysis in the
reviews of movie users to improve the recommendation process.

The proposed system draws upon two primary data sources: information about the movie from the
publicly available The Movie Database (TMDB) and user reviews that were obtained from the IMBD site.
The system goes even further, analyzing the emotion behind a user review, in this way, it is aiming to get a
better understanding of a user's subjective experience and emotions towards different movies eventually,
making more accurate and personalized suggestions. Having sentiment analysis inbuilt, the system attempts
to cover the distance between purely objective metadata and user subjective interests and eventually provides
a recommendation system that has been improved and leads to an outstanding experience.

Keywords: content based, movie metadata, TMBD, Sentiment analysis, User preferences
 HANGZHOU NORMAL UNIVERSITY TH Movie Recommender System

CATALOG

Chapter1Introduction..........................................................................................................................................
Chapter2 Literature Review...............................................................................................................................

Chapter2 Background and Related Work...........................................................................................................

2.1 Recommender Systems.......................................................................................

2.2 Content-Based Filtering for Movies...................................................................

2.3 Sentiment Analysis and User Reviews...............................................................

Chapter3 System Architecture............................................................................................................................

3.1 Components........................................................................................................

3.2 Data Sources.......................................................................................................

3.3 System Workflow................................................................................................

Chapter4 Implementation Details.......................................................................................................................

4.1 Data Retrieval and Processing............................................................................

4.2 Sentiment Analysis Techniques..........................................................................

4.3 Recommendation Engine....................................................................................

4.4 User Interface......................................................................................................

Chapter5 Evaluation and Results........................................................................................................................

Chapter6 Conclusions and Future Work.............................................................................................................

References...........................................................................................................................................................

Acknowledge......................................................................................................................................................
 HANGZHOU NORMAL UNIVERSITY TH Movie Recommender System

Chapter1 Introduction

The unbelievable explosion of online media platforms that provide users with virtually an unlimited
number of movies, TV series and other video content has turned this into a huge problem of digging out
relevant content that is close to user’s hearts out of a vast ocean of entertainment possibilities. However,
because of this problem, the personalized recommendation systems came into play as the irreplaceable tools,
which based on advanced algorithms and methods learned to regularly suggest movies and other content
personalized to an individual taste of every viewer. Considering different strategies of content-based
applications, this approach has been widely used for its ability to analyze in-the-fly content of the movies,
like genre, director, actors, plot summaries, and user reviews and show similarities to recommend accordingly.
Nevertheless, conventional content filtering techniques usually miss the individual feelings of the customer
in their reviews and most of the time are based on objective metadata rather than subjective user’s emotions
to generate recommendations. To bridge the gap and improve the precision and the meaningfulness of movies
recommendations the thesis develops a content-based movie recommender system which implements a
sentiment analysis on user reviews. Using the sentiments derived from user reviews together with the
objective metadata sources such as The Movie Database (TMDB) API and Internet Movie Database (IMDb),
the system is intended to come up with recommendations that are more specific depending on the emotional
response felt by the movie lovers. The use of sentiment analysis techniques will allow the system to parse
the sentiment expressed in each review into positive, negative, or neutral and then integrate the sentiment
scores in the content-based filtering algorithms to catch the movies that are liked by the users and influence
them emotionally. The thesis starts from background research, then system architecture and the specific
implementation of the content-based recommender system, which includes not only the objective but also
subjective data sources to improve accuracy.

For system's assessment, the use of precision, recall, and user surveys as the measures is to establish the
personalization success of the system against the traditional methods. This statement offers a detailed and
unique film recommendation framework based on sentiment analysis that employs sentiment analysis and
delivers personalized recommendations to make streaming experience more enjoyable on overcrowded
online media platforms.

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Chapter2 Literature Review

What is more, conventional content-based filtering methods heavily depend on objective metadata as a
basis for their recommendations, for example, on genre, cast, and director. Nevertheless, this way of thinking
ignores the feelings and emotions expressed by viewers in their appraisals of a particular film and such
opinions may give insights into the emotional effect of the film.

The shortcoming of content-based recommendation systems with respect to sentiment analysis was
addressed by the researchers through the integration of sentiment analysis techniques to improve the accuracy
and relevance of their recommendations. Sentiment Analysis, which is a part of NLP (Natural Language
Processing), is a method that studies opinions, sentiments, and emotions expressed in textual data, and the
computational study of them. Analyzing user reviews and sorting the expressed feeling into positive, negative,
or neutral allows for implementation of emotional feedback into algorithm of recommendation system,
providing more accurate and personalized recommendations that will connect with end-users from emotional
side.

Several studies have proven in getting closer recommendation precision is one of them. Pang, and Lee
(2008) initiated the task of movie review classification by using sentiment analysis techniques, thus,
making the groundwork easier for future research in this sphere. On the other hand, long as Whittaker et.al.
(2010) as will is otherwise add with augments content-based filtering with based collaborative filtering that
use both the objective and metadata and the subjective user ratings to generate the recommendations.

Zhang et al. (2014) designed a sentiment-based movie recommender system by combining sentiment
analysis of user reviews along with user reviews to improve the accuracy of traditional content-based filtering
methods. Subjective user sentiments are important, and their approach is challenging the traditional methods
of recommendation in that accuracy has improved. This shows the value of integrating the sentiments with
the recommendation process.

Soleymani et al. - dating back to 2017 - became the ones that proposed a multi-modal sentiment analysis
framework that makes use of both the textual data provided by the user reviews and the visual and acoustic
data in this case from the pieces of the movie trailers further to take into consideration a more nuanced view
on user sentiments. By using a range of data modalities in the systems, their results proved their hypothesis
that multi-modal data facilitates the performance of sentiment-aware recommendation systems.

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The achievement of sentiment analysis in improving recommendation precision hinges on the factor that the
issues of coping with the abstract nature of natural languages like sarcasm, context-specific expressions, and
ambiguity stands as a barrier. Meanwhile, the presence or the quality of user generated content like reviews,
could sometimes vary across platforms or based on films which in turn can affect the effectiveness of
sentiment-aware recommendation systems.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Sentiment Analysis in Recommendations:

Given the huge potential of sentiment analysis in recommendation systems, the future of this technology
is promising. NLP facilities which are rapidly developing, with a continuous improvement in the machine
capabilities to understand the complexities of human language. NLP solutions are being investigated to
handle problems like figurativeness and ambiguities, which would enable recommendation systems to have
a better understanding of user reviews and generate correct recommendations.

What motivates me most is the exploitation of deep learning methods which move beyond the analysis
of the sentiment of reviews and have more in-depth capabilities. The techniques focus on the emotional
trajectory of the movie apart from the character arc. Picture a system that could not only determine a comedy
movie by relating reviews but also know if it matches your sense of humor style – dry wit, stupid humor or
maybe something weird. This would provide you with a favorable recommendation to choose either a funny,
romantic movie for those who just had a breakup, or one that would make you pump and spill adrenaline.

Beyond Reviews: Unveiling Preferences Through User Interactions:

Sentiment analysis doesn't end only showing written reviews; it goes more than that. Through their work
of not only reviews, but also capturing user behavior, recommendation systems can have better understanding
of customers' emotional sensitivity. These interactions can be many, involving such activities as watching
history, pausing/rewinding patterns as well as seeing socials networks being active by sharing thoughts on
movies. Similarly, the system can monitor repetitive actions such as making pauses during suspense scenes
as well as playing funny scenes again, and consequently, the system finds out your tolerance for tension and
your sense of humor. Personal discussions you've had with other fans via social media on TV shows and
films you watch, equally, can be indicative of your emotional state. Using this vibrant user information,
recommendation systems can develop in-depth understanding of your movie tastes that include more than
“like” and “dislike” ratings.

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The Responsibility of Recommendations: Avoiding Echo Chambers and Bias:

Of course, every great power comes with the solemn commitment of great responsibility as well. As
recommendation systems become adept at understanding our emotional preferences, there's a potential
downside: echo chambers or recommendation bias. When a user gets all content that would just repeat their
opinion or something reasonable – it’s an echo chamber. Consequently, this stunts the opportunities to see
from different vantage points and results in a common experience across the genre. Another kind of
recommendation bias will surface when the system specializes in a narrow number of movies or genres at
the expense of low-profile or movies from minority groups.

To handle the concerns of this kind, the recommendation systems can be done to have the diversity in the
suggestion. The following process might cover things like movies that expose you to new genres that differ
from your usual taste or have a different rating than films which are popular among the masses. Finding the
ecstasy of unexpected favorites, which makes part of a movie viewing, can be essential. By balancing user
preferences

The introduction of sentiment analysis in the determinacy of content-based filtering is an immense means
that increases the resorting to recommend films. Notwithstanding, it is one of the musical instruments that
should be used to create perfect recommendation system, and in this, the above types play the lead role.
Coactive filtering, based on the concept of collective intelligence of people and their preferences, tries to
supplement content-centred solutions. The fact that, for instance, user activity, location, or time can be added
as contextual data will bring about smarter recommendations. In the end, the combination of these methods
adapted to specific users’ requirements determines the creation of a socially resonating recommendation
system, which meets personal taste and preferences.

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Chapter3 Background

3.1 Recommender Systems:

Recommender systems are recognized as important tools in the contemporary digital world as they try to
give personalized solutions based on the unique taste of the customers and their earlier contacts. These
systems are fundamental across a broad section of domains including online shopping platforms, streaming
media services, and the internet that help users to find the things that suit/sit well with their taste and likes
from the massive content libraries. Two main approaches of content recommenders have been proven
effective when aiming to provide good customer experience; collaborative filtering, which studies the user
interactions, such as likes, and purchase history to suggest things which people with similar tastes have
preferred. On the contrary, the content-based filtering approach is associated with an evaluation of item
characteristics, namely the descriptions and genres, to offer related items based on the intrinsic characteristics
of such items. Collaborative filtering, which thrives on complex user patterns, could jointly suffer the new
products or users matter because of data shortage, known as the cold-start problem. Instead of implied-value
based filtering that is susceptible to this issue but can be less exact, content-based one could be more relevant
and go beyond item attributes highlighting more subjective user preferences. Regardless of their
individualities, both methods add up and are key to the vivid user's engagement and experience of digital
platforms.

3.2 Content-Based Filtering for Movies

Content-based filtering excels in movie and other media content recommendation because it can compare
movies which there is a variety of movie attributes like genre, director, actors, trailer, and user's comments.
Many other types of content-related movie recommendation systems have emerged in both research and
industrial settings. The systems of this sort usually use metadata like genre, director or actors to identify
identical movies. Take the example of a user writing down an affinity for action movies directed by
Christopher Nolan. The system may suggest other movies directed by Nolan or those with similar
characteristics. This approach is instrumental in precision recommendations which are grounded in the
objective movie traits. Despite that, it doesn't guarantee that the systems can measure the subjective
experiences and emotions that users express about a particular film, which are crucial elements for
understanding their preferences and inclinations. Although movies may belong to the same genres and be
directed by the same personalities and actors, they can elicit different emotional reactions and reviews

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from viewers, thanks to the elements like storytelling, cinematography, and such.

Figure1: Content based recommendation systems

3.3 Sentiment Analysis and User Reviews

Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, constitutes one of the majors of natural language
processing (NLP) and its mission is to find, compile and analyze subjective information which could be
opinions, emotions or attitudes out of the text information. Sentiment analysis, which is an applied research
tool in many areas, from product reviews to social media analysis and customer feedback analysis, has gained
a lot of popularity in recent times. User reviews constitute a significant amount of data necessary for
sentiment analysis, as their contents are mostly subjective and touch upon emotions positive and negative.
The Website IMBD provides user reviews to the viewers that allows getting information about general
perceptions and the feelings of the audience towards the movie. The statements from these reviews express
the people`s subjective feelings about the movies, which help to integrate the objective metadata that is used
in content-based filtering. The utilization of emotion analysis of user reviews within a movie-based content-
based recommender system will enable the identification of the subjective experiences and emotions
expressed by different users through the movies that they watch, hence, the preferable movies could be
recommended. Such personal information can be used for recommending systems and could bring about
more customized and in sync recommendations across users' tastes and likes. For instance, if a user has

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mentioned that he had enjoyed a film with an intriguing storyline and a

complicated interaction among the characters in their review, sentiment analysis might come up with such
likes and dislikes. The recommender system goes on to place movies in the user’s preference list of genres
and casts, but also those that are similar in terms of personal impression that the user has expressed over the
previously watched films.

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Chapter3 Evolutionary Programming

3.1 Components
The proposed movie recommender system that applies sentiment analysis and is built on a content-
based approach consists of multiple modules requiring appropriate integration to make movie
recommendations. Primarily, the part Data Retrieval from Movie (1) will be given to TMDB API, which has
all the detailed movie's information. This data consists of some details like the movie title, genre, run time,
rating, and poster images among others which make it easier to understand the movie’s characteristics and
attributes in relation to the other movies. Since the system combined with open TMDB API, the users will
get access to flamboyant and fresh movie information without wasting time for update. This supplied
accuracy and relevance into their movie recommendations.

Subsequently, User Review Scraping (2) is performed, using imdb ID of movies which has been
acquired from the responses via TMDB API referred to for the purpose of the reviews scraping from IMDb
website. Such user reviews are the best choices of subjective feedback where the audience evaluates the
movie from their angle of views in terms the feelings and the opinion they hold about the film. Analyzing
these reviews is one of the ways for the system to showcase the users’ diverse experience and feelings that
don’t just come to mind when metadata are being considered.

When the reviews reach that part of the sentiment analysis (3), they get classified using advanced
artificial intelligence technology that comprehends and determines if the sentiment in the review is positive,
negative, or neutral. Such feeling analysis not only adds context to the provided information but also
contributes to apperception of the movie which will lead to providing accurate evaluations. Being equipped
with the sentiment associated with every review, the system is now fully informed about users’ likings and
disliking and can use this information to supply customers with targeted recommendations.

3.2 Data Sources:

Our system relies on two primary data sources:
 The Movie Database (TMDB) API: This publicly available API provides access to a vast database

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of movie information, including titles, genres, release dates, cast and crew details, plot summaries,
and more. The API is used to retrieve movie metadata needed for the content-based filtering and

recommendation process.
 Internet Movie Database (IMDb): IMDb is a popular online database of information related to
movies, TV shows, and other video content. It hosts user reviews and ratings for various movies,
which are scraped and used for sentiment analysis in the proposed system.

3.3 System Workflow:

The overall workflow of the content-based movie recommender system with sentiment analysis can be
summarized as follows:

1) A user makes a note about a film that interests them or lists their movie genre preferences, actions stars,
etc. in his/ her likes.
2) The system will grab the movie metadata (such as genres, popularity, release date and ratings) from
TMDB's API via the specified parameters.
3) For the forthcoming movie the system grabs the data from IMDb site via the movie's IMDb ID.
4) The review part of the scraped reviews is distributed through sentiment analysis part where the degree
of expressed sentiment is classified as positive, negative, or neutral.
5) The recommendation engine not only connects the movies’ list and sentiment analysis data, but also
helps predict the movies that the user likes or expressed high praise previously.
6) The movie recommendations are offered to the user in user interface; there are other details provided
such as title, the genre and the rating. The user interface also includes the sentiment analysis results that
have been done on the user reviews.

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Figure 2: System Architecture

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Chapter4 Implementation

4.1 Data Retrieval and Processing:

This system uses the Python requests library to share information with TMDBAPI and extract movie
details. This library gives us access to various communication modes with the API using which I can easily
pull out all the needed movie details, for example, title, genre, runtime, rating, and poster URL among others
from the JSON-formatted response. This metadata thus serves as the core for offering movie
recommendations in a personalized fashion that would suit the user taste
While at the same time, for such a user review scraping from IMDb, the system makes use of the
beautifulsoup4 library in Python as well. The library can read HTML contents from IMDb pages of movies
and fetch reviews written by users. With the assistance of the system in locating HTML elements having user
reviews, it becomes feasible for the system to extract reviews for their analysis and use. This user feedback
function acts as the objective factor in the process of recommendations, providing an avenue for gathering
sentiments and opinions of different viewers. Finally, we integrate the database of both libraries and the
feedback from our users, so the information we get is reliable and the recommendations are more relevant.

Figure 3: Main dataset for 5000 movie csv file exported from IMDB

4.2 Sentiment Analysis Techniques:

The recommender system is a serialized of the requests API in Python which talks to the TMDB API

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and puts up the requests for JSON-formatted check it out here movie metadata. The beautifulsoup4 library is
used to parse HTML IMDb pages in the case of user review scraping and to gain review text.
The similarity metric cosine which is used for sentiment analysis part of the inspection evaluates user
review sentiment. This approach involves the following steps:This approach involves the following steps:
(1) Text Preprocessing: Performing operations like tokenization, stop word removal and
stemming/lemmatization are typically employed to make the text review ready for analysis and thus
preprocessing is used to prepare text for semantic analysis.
(2) Feature Extraction: Through bag-of-words or TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document
Frequency) vectors, authors create a vector representation of each review, using the most
characteristic keywords. This means text categorization is mapped to a numeric feature space.
(3) Sentiment Lexicon: Firstly, a sentiment lexicon is prepared. This contains both a list of words with
their corresponding sentiment scores/polarities. Consequently, this vocabulary encompasses lexicon
with some terms negated or unlabeled and given negative, positive or neutral sentiments scores.
(4) Cosine Similarity Calculation: The cosine similarity between each review vector and an
implemented positive sentiment vector (which is the result of sentiment-lexicon compilation) is
computed. Cosine similarity score higher means positive sentiment, while lower than expected score
shows negative sentiment.
(5) Sentiment Classification: According to the cosine closeness of the scores, review are classified into
one of three sentiment categories – positive, negative or neutral – with the use of predefined
thresholds to other classifying techniques.

The rationale for the decision of cosine similarity as the sentiment analysis method is its capability to
ingest the semantic proximity between the review text and the sentiment lexicon, without demanding labeled
training data. Yet, such topics might not get such subtleties represented by complex linguistic constructs like
machine learning or transformer-based methods.

The suggestive engine, due to the metadata and the sentiment analysis scores, could create the feature
of each movie, which could be compared by the cosine similarity to find the similar movies of the user's
preferences or highly rated ones

The user interface, which is Flask backed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, has components such as the
Homme Page which is used for searching or browsing movies, Movie Details Page showing the movie
information and the sentiment analysis summary, Recommendation Page which has the recommended
movies and their details, User Authentication for registration and login, and User Feedback and Rating

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Functions.

Figure 5: Cosine similarity code output

4.3 Recommendation Engine:

The recommendation engine is the core part of our system, responsible for generating personalized movie
recommendations based on the user's preferences and the sentiment analysis results from user reviews. This
part employs content-based filtering algorithms to find movies like those that the user has previously liked
or expressed positive sentiment towards.

Several similarity metrics and algorithms can be used for content-based filtering, including the algorithm
we have used in our project:
 Cosine Similarity: This metric measures the cosine of the angle between two vectors representing
the movie attributes or features. Movies with a higher cosine similarity score are considered more

similar. This metric is particularly useful when dealing with high-dimensional feature vectors, such as
those derived from text data like plot summaries or user reviews.

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Figure 6: Cosine similarity

The modal aiming engines take together the film metadata (like movie genre, actors, director, synopsis)
and sentiment analysis scores to produce feature vector for each movie. Those feature vectors are then
subjected to similarity metric according to what is chosen to present the most relevant movies preferences or
rated movies with positive reviews of the sites; for instance, if a user has loved movies before with a
captivating storyline and strong characters to develop, the recommendation engine would assign more values
to those subjective features suggested when sentiment analysis was done. It would then compute the affinity
scores between the favorite movies of a user and other movies in the database to rank the results based on
their likeliness, and place high scores based on both objective and subjective metadata.
Another point is that recommendation engine may exploit the collaborative filtering or hybrid methods as
well as the approaches to increase the accuracy of the recommendation. One example of collaborative
filtering is about the preferences and behaviors of other users such as those who are of the same taste while
the other way of combination is the one that brings the strength of both content-based and collaborative
filtering methods together.

4.4 User interface

The system provides a user-friendly interface for users to interact with the movie recommender system.
The interface allows users to input their preferences, view movie details and recommendations, and
potentially provide feedback or ratings on the recommended movies.

The user interface is implemented using Flask, a Python web framework, and HTML, CSS, and

JavaScript for the front-end. It includes the following components:

Home Page: The entry point of the application, where users can search for movies or browse a list of available

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movies. The home page includes an input field for users to enter a movie title, as well as a dropdown menu
to select from a list of available movies.

Figure 7: The Home Page

Movie Details Page: This page displays detailed information about a selected movie, including its title,
poster, overview, rating, genres, release date, runtime, and status. It also highlights the top cast members for
the movie and provides a summary of the sentiment analysis results for user reviews.

Figure 9: Movie Details Display

Recommendation Page: This page presents the recommended movies based on the user's preferences or the
selected movie. It displays the movie posters, titles, and relevant details, along with a summary of the

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sentiment analysis results for user reviews. Users can click on individual movie posters to view more details
about the recommended movies.

Figure 10: More Recommendations Display

User Authentication: The system includes user authentication functionality, allowing users to register, log
in, and log out. User data, including usernames, passwords, and email addresses, is stored in an SQLite
database for authentication and personalization purposes.

Figure 11: Registration Page

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Figure 12: Login Page

The user interface is designed to be intuitive and user-friendly, providing a seamless experience for users
to discover and explore new movie recommendations. It incorporates modern web design principles and
responsive layouts to ensure a consistent experience across different devices and screen sizes.

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Chapter5 Evaluation and Results

Precision and Recall: These indicators are being used to understand the validity of system
recommendations so selected relevant movies by the users are compared with the system recommended
movies for each user. Accuracy indicates the exactness of the suggested list of movies followed by recall
which is the number of the contextually correct movies that made it on the recommendation list.

User Satisfaction: Survey of users and sampling of feedback were carried out to rate the actual
implementation of the suggestions or advice provided to users by the system. The users were ticked to rate
our recommendations on a Likert scale, and they filled in a qualitative feedback form on their experience
with the provided system.

Comparison with Baseline: The effectiveness of the proposed system was assessed against the Backbone
Content-based filter without including sentiment analysis, to examine the impact of the sentiment analysis
component on the quality of the recommendations. In this case, the starting system was dependent only on
the dimensions of the movie such as genre, director, and actors, for the purpose of creating the
recommendations.

The evaluation of the process was done by a collection of people from a wide-ranging similarity of
movie choices and interests. The participants were instructed to bring two or three of the movies they liked
most. The system then matched them to the most similar movies based on their preferences. The movies were
then reviewed by employing the metrics.
The results demonstrated that sentiment analysis of the user reviews was a positive factor of content-
based filtering, so it led to a noticeable increase in recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction in
comparison with base system.
In respect of precision and recall, the proposed system with emotional analysis had better results than
the baseline did. That is why it can be noticed that the recommendations were more relevant and
comprehensive. Consequently, by collecting subjective perceptions and feelings shown by users to different
movies, the system was able to utilize a more precise recommendation basis which identified the personalized
preferences of individuals.
Also, user satisfaction surveys showed that users more frequently clicked on the website's
recommendations provided by the sentiment-aware system and found them to be more closely aligned with
their preferences. The users reported that the system did a good job in capturing the subtle details in their

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movie choices that can't be simply represented by a traditional rating system, such as storytelling, character
development, and emotional resonance. Additionally, the comparison showed that the inclusion of sentiment
analysis is very helpful in incorporating this feature. Whereas the default model consi
dered objective metadata and thus was not able to show a deep propel into the subjectivity of the movie, the
enhanced system did it. Combining the objective film attributes with user sentiments' subjectivity turned out
to be a descriptor system capable of delivering a more inclusive and personalized recommendation experience.

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Chapter6 Conclusions and Future Work

In this work, the design and implementation of content based them, and movie recommendation system
is discussed that involves sentiment analysis on users review specially for the improvement of the
recommendation process. The system attempted to merge Movie metadata from API TMDB with reviews’
data scraped from IMDb and sentimental analysis techniques intending to provide users with two things;
more relevant and personalized movie recommendations.

The experimented system was innovative in sensing the possibilities of pulling through user-generated
content while also embarking on sentiment analysis as a way of improving performance content-based
recommender systems. If the determining system could understand how people feel and who they love
through the expressions and emotions in the comments of users, it will have more complicated
recommendations which are based on users' favorites and affinities.

The results of the assessment, where precision and recall Metris, user satisfaction surveys, and compares with
the base approach have been revealed the efficiency of the suggested method. We have been able to see the
positive influence of the sentiment analysis in the content-based filtering process, which has led to a crucial
improvement in the recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction, making us understand why it is
important to incorporate sentiment analysis into recommendation systems.

Several areas for future work and improvement can be explored:

Incorporating Collaborative Filtering: Thus, the combination of the content filtering with the collaborative
filtering methods can empower a higher relevance of the recommendations through the usage of the similar
information from other users who have similar preferences. Algorithmic approaches are hybridizing with
content-based and collaborative filtering methods which might prove themselves to be the best, for item
attributes and user behavior patterns are unanimously covered because of such methods.

Exploring Advanced Sentiment Analysis Techniques: The part of the sentiment analysis which finds room
for more improvement can be achieved through the implementation of ingenious techniques, for instance,
aspect – based sentiment analysis and transfer learning approaches, which are known to yield the most
gratifying results. Such technological developments may also entail capturing minor yet meaningful attitudes
towards certain aspects of a movie such as acting, camera work, and character development of the

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movie which in turn may make resulting personalization improved..

Expanding Data Sources: Utilizing other information sources including social media or expert reviews can
be valuable since they supplement the recommendation process by offering more detailed information and
insights. Social channels will more commonly than not also audiences with user-generated content and talks
concerning films, which can easily be analyzed using sentimental analysis, to detect trends and/or preferences.

Addressing Cold-Start and Sparsity Issues: The formulation of methods to deal with cold-start problems—
statistically no users preference or surveys—and data sparsity issues-when user reviews or metadata is
limited—could be needed to grow the accuracy of the system and make it be more acceptable. Techniques
like content-based and cold-start users filtering, and, also, hybrid strategies that combine content-based and
user past behavior algorithms could be tried.

Improving User Interface and Personalization: By habitually working on the UI and discovering
personalization methods such as adaptive interfaces or tailored content pre- severance could lift both user
experience and user engagement. Taking consumers thoughts and tastes into consideration by incorporating
such information to the interface may in turn bring into existence an experience that is more in tune and
personalized.

Integrating with Streaming Platforms: Establishing integration capability with the already existing media
streaming platforms or movie datasets could result in higher utilization and effect of your system. Indefinitely,
platform tie-in can lead to the incorporation of additional datasets, better user bases and the challenges of
real-world deployments.

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HANGZHOU NORMAL UNIVERSITY TH Movie Recommender System

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply thankful to Hangzhou Normal University, School of Information Science and Technology, for
providing the necessary resources and support for the completion of my project, titled "Movie Recommender
System."

I extend my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Fanran (范然), for her invaluable guidance, encouragement,
and support throughout this project. Her ability and mentorship have been instrumental in shaping the
direction and success of this endeavor.

Additionally, I would like to express my appreciation to all the faculty members and staff of the School of
Information Science and Technology for their aid and cooperation during this project.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support and encouragement of my family and friends, whose
unwavering belief in me has been a constant source of motivation.

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