Personalized Explainable Recommendations for Self-Attention Collaboration

Abstract

In recommender systems, providing reasonable explanations can enhance users’ comprehension of recommended results. Template-based explainable recommendation heavily relies on pre-defined templates, constraining the expressiveness of generated sentences and resulting in low-quality explanations. Recently, a novel approach was introduced, utilizing embedding representations of items and comments to address the issue of user IDs and item IDs not residing in the same semantic space as words, thus attributing linguistic meaning to IDs. However, these models often fail to fully exploit collaborative information within the data. In personalized recommendation and explanation processes, understanding the user’s emotional feedback and feature preferences is paramount. To address this, we propose a personalized explainable recommendation model based on self-attention collaboration. Initially, the model employs an attention network to amalgamate the user’s historical interaction feature preferences with their user ID information, while simultaneously integrating all feature information of the item with its item ID to enhance semantic ID representation. Subsequently, the model incorporates the user’s comment feature rhetoric and sentiment feedback to generate more personalized recommendation explanations utilizing a self-attention network. Experimental evaluations conducted on two datasets of varying scales demonstrate the superiority of our model over current state-of-the-art approaches, validating its effectiveness.