Topic-Centric Explanations for News Recommendation

Abstract

News recommender systems (NRS) have been widely applied for online news websites to help users find relevant articles based on their interests. Recent methods have demonstrated considerable success in terms of recommendation performance. However, the lack of explanation for these recommendations can lead to mistrust among users and lack of acceptance of recommendations. To address this issue, we propose a new explainable news model to construct a topic-aware explainable recommendation approach that can both accurately identify relevant articles and explain why they have been recommended, using information from associated topics. Additionally, our model incorporates two coherence metrics applied to assess topic quality, providing a measure of the interpretability of these explanations. The results of our experiments on the MIND dataset indicate that the proposed explainable NRS outperforms several other baseline systems, while it is also capable of producing interpretable topics measured by coherence metrics. Furthermore, we present a case study through real-world examples showcasing the usefulness of our NRS for generating explanations.