The effectiveness of personalized movie explanations: An experiment using commercial meta-data

Abstract

This paper studies the properties of a helpful and trustworthy explanation in a movie recommender system. It discusses the results of an experiment based on a natural language explanation prototype. The explanations were varied according to three factors: degree of personalization, polarity and expression of unknown movie features. Personalized explanations were not found to be significantly more Effective than non-personalized, or baseline explanations. Rather, explanations in all three conditions performed surprisingly well. We also found that participants evaluated the explanations themselves most highly in the personalized, feature-based condition. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.