Post-hoc recommendation explanations through an efficient exploitation of the DBpedia category hierarchy

Abstract

Leveraging knowledge graphs for post-hoc recommendation explanations has been investigated in recent years. Existing approaches rely mainly on the overlap properties (encoded by knowledge graphs) that characterize both user liked items and the recommended ones. These approaches, however, do not fully leverage the property hierarchy of knowledge graphs which may lead to flawed explanations. In this paper we introduce an approach that takes the whole property hierarchy into account. This is done with a limited computation time overhead thanks to efficient algorithmic optimizations relying on sub-ontology extraction. The hierarchical relationships among properties are also considered to avoid redundant properties for explanation. We carried out a user study of 155 participants in the movie recommendation domain and used both offline and online metrics to assess the proposed approach. Significant improvements, in terms of informativeness (by 39%), persuasiveness (by 22%), engagement (by 29%) and user trust (by 26%), are suggested by the obtained results, as compared to the state-of-the-art property-based explanation model. Our findings indicate the superiority of accounting for the whole property hierarchy when dealing with post-hoc recommendation explanations.