Explaining Recommendations Using Contexts
Masahiro Sato, Budrul Ahsan, Koki Nagatani, Takashi Sonoda, Qian Zhang, Tomoko Ohkuma · 2018
Recommender systems support user decision-making, and explanations of recommendations further facilitate their usefulness. Previous explanation styles are based on similar users, similar items, demographics of users, and contents of items. Contexts, such as usage scenarios and accompanying persons, have not been used for explanations, although they influence user decisions. In this paper, we propose a context style explanation method, presenting contexts suitable for consuming recommended items. The expected impacts of context style explanations are 1) persuasiveness: recognition of suitable context for usage motivates users to consume items, and 2) usefulness: envisioning context helps users to make right choices because the values of items depend on contexts. We evaluate context style persuasiveness and usefulness by a crowdsourcing-based user study in a restaurant recommendation setting. The context style explanation is compared to demographic and content style explanations. We also combine context style and other explanation styles, confirming that hybrid styles improve persuasiveness and usefulness of explanation.