Explaining Recommendation System Using Counterfactual Textual Explanations
This work addresses the need for more interpretable AI systems, particularly for end-users of recommender systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing counterfactual reasoning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of improving explainability in recommender systems by generating counterfactual explanations for both tabular and textual features, resulting in a +5% improvement in finding effective features compared to baseline methods.
Currently, there is a significant amount of research being conducted in the field of artificial intelligence to improve the explainability and interpretability of deep learning models. It is found that if end-users understand the reason for the production of some output, it is easier to trust the system. Recommender systems are one example of systems that great efforts have been conducted to make their output more explainable. One method for producing a more explainable output is using counterfactual reasoning, which involves altering minimal features to generate a counterfactual item that results in changing the output of the system. This process allows the identification of input features that have a significant impact on the desired output, leading to effective explanations. In this paper, we present a method for generating counterfactual explanations for both tabular and textual features. We evaluated the performance of our proposed method on three real-world datasets and demonstrated a +5\% improvement on finding effective features (based on model-based measures) compared to the baseline method.