Argumentation-Based Recommendations: Fantastic Explanations and How to Find Them

Argumentation-Based Recommendations: Fantastic Explanations and How to Find Them

Antonio Rago, Oana Cocarascu, Francesca Toni

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 1949-1955. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/269

A significant problem of recommender systems is their inability to explain recommendations, resulting in turn in ineffective feedback from users and the inability to adapt to users’ preferences. We propose a hybrid method for calculating predicted ratings, built upon an item/aspect-based graph with users’ partially given ratings, that can be naturally used to provide explanations for recommendations, extracted from user-tailored Tripolar Argumentation Frameworks (TFs). We show that our method can be understood as a gradual semantics for TFs, exhibiting a desirable, albeit weak, property of balance. We also show experimentally that our method is competitive in generating correct predictions, compared with state-of-the-art methods, and illustrate how users can interact with the generated explanations to improve quality of recommendations.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Models of Argument
Machine Learning: Recommender Systems