skip to main content


Title: Sequence-Based Explainable Hybrid Song Recommendation
Despite advances in deep learning methods for song recommendation, most existing methods do not take advantage of the sequential nature of song content. In addition, there is a lack of methods that can explain their predictions using the content of recommended songs and only a few approaches can handle the item cold start problem. In this work, we propose a hybrid deep learning model that uses collaborative filtering (CF) and deep learning sequence models on the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) content of songs to provide accurate recommendations, while also being able to generate a relevant, personalized explanation for each recommended song. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our validation experiments showed that in addition to generating explainable recommendations, our model stood out among the top performers in terms of recommendation accuracy and the ability to handle the item cold start problem. Moreover, validation shows that our personalized explanations capture properties that are in accordance with the user’s preferences.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2026584
NSF-PAR ID:
10354784
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Frontiers in Big Data
Volume:
4
ISSN:
2624-909X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Methods for making high-quality recommendations often rely on learning latent representations from interaction data. These methods, while performant, do not provide ready mechanisms for users to control the recommendation they receive. Our work tackles this problem by proposing LACE, a novel concept value bottleneck model for controllable text recommendations. LACE represents each user with a succinct set of human-readable concepts through retrieval given user-interacted documents and learns personalized representations of the concepts based on user documents. This concept based user profile is then leveraged to make recommendations. The design of our model affords control over the recommendations through a number of intuitive interactions with a transparent user profile. We first establish the quality of recommendations obtained from LACE in an offline evaluation on three recommendation tasks spanning six datasets in warm-start, cold-start, and zero-shot setups. Next, we validate the controllability of LACE under simulated user interactions. Finally, we implement LACE in an interactive controllable recommender system and conduct a user study to demonstrate that users are able to improve the quality of recommendations they receive through interactions with an editable user profile. 
    more » « less
  2. Methods for making high-quality recommendations often rely on learning latent representations from interaction data. These methods, while performant, do not provide ready mechanisms for users to control the recommendation they receive. Our work tackles this problem by proposing LACE, a novel concept value bottleneck model for controllable text recommendations. LACE represents each user with a succinct set of human-readable concepts through retrieval given user-interacted documents and learns personalized representations of the concepts based on user documents. This concept based user profile is then leveraged to make recommendations. The design of our model affords control over the recommendations through a number of intuitive interactions with a transparent user profile. We first establish the quality of recommendations obtained from LACE in an offline evaluation on three recommendation tasks spanning six datasets in warm-start, cold-start, and zero-shot setups. Next, we validate the controllability of LACE under simulated user interactions. Finally, we implement LACE in an interactive controllable recommender system and conduct a user study to demonstrate that users are able to improve the quality of recommendations they receive through interactions with an editable user profile. 
    more » « less
  3. Personalized recommendation of learning content is one of the most frequently cited benefits of personalized online learning. It is expected that with personalized content recommendation students will be able to build their own unique and optimal learning paths and to achieve course goals in the most optimal way. However, in many practical cases students search for learning content not to expand their knowledge, but to address problems encountered in the learning process, such as failures to solve a problem. In these cases, students could be better assisted by remedial recommendations focused on content that could help in resolving current problems. This paper presents a transparent and explainable interface for remedial recommendations in an online programming practice system. The interface was implemented to support SQL programming practice and evaluated in the context of a large database course. The paper summarizes the insights obtained from the study and discusses future work on remedial recommendations. 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    The success of cross-domain recommender systems in capturing user interests across multiple domains has recently brought much attention to them. These recommender systems aim to improve the quality of suggestions and defy the cold-start problem by transferring information from one (or more) source domain(s) to a target domain. However, most cross-domain recommenders ignore the sequential information in user history. They only rely on an aggregate or snapshot of user feedback in the past. Most importantly, they do not explicitly model how users transition from one domain to another domain as users continue to interact with different item domains. In this paper, we argue that between-domain transitions in user sequences are useful in improving recommendation quality, dealing with the cold-start problem, and revealing interesting aspects of how user interests transform from one domain to another. We propose TransCrossCF, transition-based cross-domain collaborative filtering, that can capture both within and between domain transitions of user feedback sequences while understanding the relationship between different item types in different domains. Specifically, we model each purchase of a user as a transition from his/her previous item to the next one, under the effect of item domains and user preferences. Our intensive experiments demonstrate that TransCrossCF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in recommendation task on three real-world datasets, both in the cold-start and hot-start scenarios. Moreover, according to our context analysis evaluations, the between-domain relations captured by TransCrossCF are interpretable and intuitive. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Textual explanations have proved to help improve user satisfaction on machine-made recommendations. However, current mainstream solutions loosely connect the learning of explanation with the learning of recommendation: for example, they are often separately modeled as rating prediction and content generation tasks. In this work, we propose to strengthen their connection by enforcing the idea of sentiment alignment between a recommendation and its corresponding explanation. At training time, the two learning tasks are joined by a latent sentiment vector, which is encoded by the recommendation module and used to make word choices for explanation generation. At both training and inference time, the explanation module is required to generate explanation text that matches sentiment predicted by the recommendation module. Extensive experiments demonstrate our solution outperforms a rich set of baselines in both recommendation and explanation tasks, especially on the improved quality of its generated explanations. More importantly, our user studies confirm our generated explanations help users better recognize the differences between recommended items and understand why an item is recommended. 
    more » « less