Title
Personalized Reason Generation for Explainable Song Recommendation
Abstract
Personalized recommendation has received a lot of attention as a highly practical research topic. However, existing recommender systems provide the recommendations with a generic statement such as “Customers who bought this item also bought…”. Explainable recommendation, which makes a user aware of why such items are recommended, is in demand. The goal of our research is to make the users feel as if they are receiving recommendations from their friends. To this end, we formulate a new challenging problem called personalized reason generation for explainable recommendation for songs in conversation applications and propose a solution that generates a natural language explanation of the reason for recommending a song to that particular user. For example, if the user is a student, our method can generate an output such as “Campus radio plays this song at noon every day, and I think it sounds wonderful,” which the student may find easy to relate to. In the offline experiments, through manual assessments, the gain of our method is statistically significant on the relevance to songs and personalization to users comparing with baselines. Large-scale online experiments show that our method outperforms manually selected reasons by 8.2% in terms of click-through rate. Evaluation results indicate that our generated reasons are relevant to songs and personalized to users, and they attract users to click the recommendations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3337967
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Conversational recommendation, explainable recommendation, natural language generation, personalization, recommender system
Recommender system,Natural language generation,World Wide Web,Conversation,Computer science,Baseline (configuration management),Natural language,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Personalization
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
10
4
2157-6904
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guoshuai Zhao113510.22
Hao Fu2231.72
Ruihua Song3113859.33
Tetsuya Sakai41460139.97
Zhongxia Chen5773.43
Xing Xie69105527.49
Xueming Qian7105270.70