Jointly Learning Explainable Rules for Recommendation with Knowledge Graph

Weizhi Ma, Min Zhang, Yue Cao, Woojeong Jin, Chenyang Wang, Yiqun Liu, Shaoping Ma, Xiang Ren

Abstract: Explainability and effectiveness are two key aspects for building recommender systems. Prior efforts mostly focus on incorporating side information to achieve better recommendation performance. However, these methods have some weaknesses: (1) prediction of neural network-based embedding methods are hard to explain and debug; (2) symbolic, graph-based approaches (e.g., meta path-based models) require manual efforts and domain knowledge to define patterns and rules, and ignore the item association types (e.g. substitutable and complementary). In this paper, we propose a novel joint learning framework to integrate induction of explainable rules from knowledge graph with construction of a rule-guided neural recommendation model. The framework encourages two modules to complement each other in generating effective and explainable recommendation: 1) inductive rules, mined from item-centric knowledge graphs, summarize common multi-hop relational patterns for inferring different item associations and provide human-readable explanation for model prediction; 2) recommendation module can be augmented by induced rules and thus have better generalization ability dealing with the cold-start issue. Extensive experiments1 show that our proposed method has achieved significant improvements in item recommendation over baselines on real-world datasets. Our model demonstrates robust performance over “noisy” item knowledge graphs, generated by linking item names to related entities.