LLM-Driven Aspect-Based Semantic Alignment for Review-Based Recommendation

Abstract

User-generated reviews contain rich semantics that can reveal users’ fine-grained preferences beyond what interaction data alone can capture. However, existing review-based recommender systems often fail to achieve semantic alignment between review content and user–item interactions, as they either treat reviews as coarse textual signals or rely on sentiment-oriented heuristics. Achieving such fine-grained alignment is challenging due to the inherent complexity and context dependence of review texts, as well as the semantic gap between explicit review information and implicit interaction preferences. To bridge this gap, we propose LLM-ASAR, a Large Language Model-driven framework for Aspect-based Semantic Alignment in Review-based Recommendation that explicitly aligns aspect-level review semantics with user–item interaction patterns. Specifically, LLM-ASAR leverages LLMs with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to perform sentence-level reasoning on user reviews, extracting aspect-specific semantics that are structurally integrated into aspect-specific interaction graphs. A multi-aspect contrastive alignment mechanism is further introduced to align user and item embeddings with corresponding aspect-level review features, ensuring consistency across modalities. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LLM-ASAR not only achieves significant accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art baselines but also yields interpretable insights into user preferences through its aspect-aware design. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/HuilinChenJN/LLM-ASAR.