Improving Personalized Explanation Generation through Visualization

Shijie Geng, Zuohui Fu, Yingqiang Ge, Lei Li, Gerard de Melo, Yongfeng Zhang


Abstract
In modern recommender systems, there are usually comments or reviews from users that justify their ratings for different items. Trained on such textual corpus, explainable recommendation models learn to discover user interests and generate personalized explanations. Though able to provide plausible explanations, existing models tend to generate repeated sentences for different items or empty sentences with insufficient details. This begs an interesting question: can we immerse the models in a multimodal environment to gain proper awareness of real-world concepts and alleviate above shortcomings? To this end, we propose a visually-enhanced approach named METER with the help of visualization generation and text–image matching discrimination: the explainable recommendation model is encouraged to visualize what it refers to while incurring a penalty if the visualization is incongruent with the textual explanation. Experimental results and a manual assessment demonstrate that our approach can improve not only the text quality but also the diversity and explainability of the generated explanations.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
244–255
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.20
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.20
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shijie Geng, Zuohui Fu, Yingqiang Ge, Lei Li, Gerard de Melo, and Yongfeng Zhang. 2022. Improving Personalized Explanation Generation through Visualization. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 244–255, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Personalized Explanation Generation through Visualization (Geng et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.20.pdf