Recency, Popularity, and Diversity of Explanations in Knowledge-based Recommendation

Modern knowledge-based recommender systems enable the end-to-end generation of textual explanations. These explanations are created from learnt paths between an already experience product and a recommended product in a knowledge graph, for a given user. However, none of the existing studies has investigated the extent to which properties of a single explanation (e.g., the recency of interaction with the already experience product) and of a group of explanations for a recommended list (e.g., the diversity of the explanation types) can influence the perceived explanation quality. In this paper, we summarize our previous work on conceptualizing three novel properties that model the quality of the explanations (linking interaction recency, shared entity popularity, and explanation type diversity) and proposing re-ranking approaches able to optimize for these properties. Experiments on two public data sets showed that our approaches can increase explanation quality according to the proposed properties, while preserving recommendation utility. Source code and data: https://github.com/giacoballoccu/explanation-quality-recsys.