Correlation-Driven Explainable Recommendation With Aspect and Rating Boosted Representation Learning: A Unified Joint-Ranking Framework

Jianghong Ma, Rong Wang, Tianjun Wei, Kangzhe Liu, Haijun Zhang, Xiaolei Lu

Abstract: Recommender systems are essential in the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce and social media platforms, delivering personalized recommendations by predicting user preferences. However, the growing need for explainable recommendation has arisen to enhance transparency and persuasiveness. In response, we present correlation-driven explainable recommendation with aspect and rating boosted representation learning (CER-ARRL), a unified joint-ranking framework that capitalizes on the robust capabilities of neural collaborative filtering to model the intricate dynamics among users, items, and explanations. By extracting information from explicit and implicit user emotional reviews, our framework enriches the representations of users and items. This integration yields simultaneous improvements in both item recommendation and explanation ranking tasks. In addition, CER-ARRL effectively exploits the structural correlation between phrases as well as the structural and semantic correlations between emojis to facilitate explanation ranking. This work represents the pioneering work to address the item-explanation joint recommendation task by integrating both interpretative phrases and illustrative emojis. Through extensive experiments on various datasets, including our collected dataset, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing baselines.