Explainable Recommendation via Interpretable Feature Mapping and Evaluation of Explainability

Explainable Recommendation via Interpretable Feature Mapping and Evaluation of Explainability

Deng Pan, Xiangrui Li, Xin Li, Dongxiao Zhu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2690-2696. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/373

Latent factor collaborative filtering (CF) has been a widely used technique for recommender system by learning the semantic representations of users and items. Recently, explainable recommendation has attracted much attention from research community. However, trade-off exists between explainability and performance of the recommendation where metadata is often needed to alleviate the dilemma. We present a novel feature mapping approach that maps the uninterpretable general features onto the interpretable aspect features, achieving both satisfactory accuracy and explainability in the recommendations by simultaneous minimization of rating prediction loss and interpretation loss. To evaluate the explainability, we propose two new evaluation metrics specifically designed for aspect-level explanation using surrogate ground truth. Experimental results demonstrate a strong performance in both recommendation and explaining explanation, eliminating the need for metadata. Code is available from https://github.com/pd90506/AMCF.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Explainable Machine Learning
Machine Learning: Interpretability
Machine Learning: Recommender Systems