Product retrieval systems have served as the main entry for customers to discover and purchase products online. With increasing concerns on the transparency and accountability of AI systems, studies on explainable information retrieval has received more and more attention in the research community. Interestingly, in the domain of e-commerce, despite the extensive studies on explainable product recommendation, the studies of explainable product search is still in an early stage. In this paper, we study how to construct effective explainable product search by comparing model-agnostic explanation paradigms with model-intrinsic paradigms and analyzing the important factors that determine the performance of product search explanations. We propose an explainable product search model with model-intrinsic interpretability and conduct crowdsourcing to compare it with the state-of-the-art explainable product search model with model-agnostic interpretability. We observe that both paradigms have their own advantages and the effectiveness of search explanations on different properties are affected by different factors. For example, explanation fidelity is more important for user's overall satisfaction on the system while explanation novelty may be more useful in attracting user purchases. These findings could have important implications for the future studies and design of explainable product search engines.
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This content will become publicly available on January 31, 2025
A Reusable Model-agnostic Framework for Faithfully Explainable Recommendation and System Scrutability
State-of-the-art industrial-level recommender system applications mostly adopt complicated model structures such as deep neural networks. While this helps with the model performance, the lack of system explainability caused by these nearly blackbox models also raises concerns and potentially weakens the users’ trust in the system. Existing work on explainable recommendation mostly focuses on designing interpretable model structures to generate model-intrinsic explanations. However, most of them have complex structures, and it is difficult to directly apply these designs onto existing recommendation applications due to the effectiveness and efficiency concerns. However, while there have been some studies on explaining recommendation models without knowing their internal structures (i.e., model-agnostic explanations), these methods have been criticized for not reflecting the actual reasoning process of the recommendation model or, in other words, faithfulness . How to develop model-agnostic explanation methods and evaluate them in terms of faithfulness is mostly unknown. In this work, we propose a reusable evaluation pipeline for model-agnostic explainable recommendation. Our pipeline evaluates the quality of model-agnostic explanation from the perspectives of faithfulness and scrutability. We further propose a model-agnostic explanation framework for recommendation and verify it with the proposed evaluation pipeline. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our model-agnostic framework is able to generate explanations that are faithful to the recommendation model. We additionally provide quantitative and qualitative study to show that our explanation framework could enhance the scrutability of blackbox recommendation model. With proper modification, our evaluation pipeline and model-agnostic explanation framework could be easily migrated to existing applications. Through this work, we hope to encourage the community to focus more on faithfulness evaluation of explainable recommender systems.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10445534
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Information Systems
- Volume:
- 42
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1046-8188
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 29
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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