As recommendation is essentially a comparative (or ranking) process, a good explanation should illustrate to users why an item is believed to be better than another, i.e., comparative explanations about the recommended items. Ideally, after reading the explanations, a user should reach the same ranking of items as the system’s. Unfortunately, little research attention has yet been paid on such comparative explanations. In this work, we develop an extract-and-refine architecture to explain the relative comparisons among a set of ranked items from a recommender system. For each recommended item, we first extract one sentence from its associated reviews that best suits the desired comparison against a set of reference items. Then this extracted sentence is further articulated with respect to the target user through a generative model to better explain why the item is recommended. We design a new explanation quality metric based on BLEU to guide the end-to-end training of the extraction and refinement components, which avoids generation of generic content. Extensive offline evaluations on two large recommendation benchmark datasets and serious user studies against an array of state-of-the-art explainable recommendation algorithms demonstrate the necessity of comparative explanations and the effectiveness of our solution.
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Graph-based Extractive Explainer for Recommendations
Explanations in a recommender system assist users make informed decisions among a set of recommended items. Extensive research attention has been devoted to generate natural language explanations to depict how the recommendations are generated and why the users should pay attention to them. However, due to different limitations of those solutions, e.g., template-based or generation-based, it is hard to make the explanations easily perceivable, reliable, and personalized at the same time. In this work, we develop a graph attentive neural network model that seamlessly integrates user, item, attributes and sentences for extraction-based explanation. The attributes of items are selected as the intermediary to facilitate message passing for user-item specific evaluation of sentence relevance. And to balance individual sentence relevance, overall attribute coverage and content redundancy, we solve an integer linear programming problem to make the final selection of sentences. Extensive empirical evaluations against a set of state-of-the-art baseline methods on two benchmark review datasets demonstrated the generation quality of proposed solution.
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- PAR ID:
- 10381233
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2163 to 2171
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512168
