Counterfactual Language Reasoning for Explainable Recommendation Systems
This work addresses the need for trustworthy and effective recommendation systems for users and platforms, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackled the problem of explainable recommendation systems by introducing a framework that integrates structural causal models with large language models to ensure causal consistency, achieving superior performance in recommendation accuracy, explanation plausibility, and bias mitigation compared to baselines.
Explainable recommendation systems leverage transparent reasoning to foster user trust and improve decision-making processes. Current approaches typically decouple recommendation generation from explanation creation, violating causal precedence principles where explanatory factors should logically precede outcomes. This paper introduces a novel framework integrating structural causal models with large language models to establish causal consistency in recommendation pipelines. Our methodology enforces explanation factors as causal antecedents to recommendation predictions through causal graph construction and counterfactual adjustment. We particularly address the confounding effect of item popularity that distorts personalization signals in explanations, developing a debiasing mechanism that disentangles genuine user preferences from conformity bias. Through comprehensive experiments across multiple recommendation scenarios, we demonstrate that CausalX achieves superior performance in recommendation accuracy, explanation plausibility, and bias mitigation compared to baselines.