Improving matrix factorization based expert recommendation for manuscript editing services by refining user opinions with binary ratings

As language editing became an essential process for enhancing the quality of a research manuscript, there are several companies providing manuscript editing services. In such companies, a manuscript submitted for proofreading is matched with an editing expert through a manual process, which is costly and often subjective. The major drawback of the manual process is that it is almost impossible to consider the inherent characteristics of a manuscript such as writing style and paragraph composition. To this end, we propose an expert recommendation method for manuscript editing services based on matrix factorization, a well-known collaborative filtering approach for learning latent information in ordinal ratings given by users. Specifically, binary ratings are utilized to substitute ordinal ratings when negative opinions are expressed by users since negative opinions are more accurately expressed by binary ratings than ordinal ratings. From the experiments using a real-world dataset, the proposed method outperformed the rest of the compared methods with an RMSE (root mean squared error) of 0.1. Moreover, the effectiveness of substituting ordinal ratings with binary ratings was validated by conducting sentiment analysis on text reviews.