A Diary Study of Social Explanations for Recommendations in Daily Life

Abstract

We report a diary study of the explanations for the recommendations to characterize the social features in these explanations recorded by five participants over two months. The study reveals several social explanation categories (e.g., personal opinions and personal experiences) and their relationship with user contexts (e.g., location, relevant experience) and recommender attributes (e.g., integrity, expertise) illustrated in a network diagram. Specifically, personal opinions and experiences are two prominent social explanations, mainly associated with user contexts (e.g., users' preferences and users' experiences) and several recommender attributes (e.g., politeness, benevolence, and experience). Finally, we discuss several design implications for social explanations and anticipate the value of our findings regarding designing personalized social explanations in recommender systems that aim to build rapport with users, such as conversational recommender systems.