Existing explainable recommender systems have mainly modeled relationships between recommended and already experienced products, and shaped explanation types accordingly (e.g., movie "x" starred by actress "y" recommended to a user because that user watched other movies with "y" as an actress). However, none of these systems has investigated the extent to which properties of a single explanation (e.g., the recency of interaction with that actress) and of a group of explanations for a recommended list (e.g., the diversity of the explanation types) can influence the perceived explaination quality. In this paper, we conceptualized three novel properties that model the quality of the explanations (linking interaction recency, shared entity popularity, and explanation type diversity) and proposed re-ranking approaches able to optimize for these properties. Experiments on two public data sets showed that our approaches can increase explanation quality according to the proposed properties, fairly across demographic groups, while preserving recommendation utility. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/giacoballoccu/explanation-quality-recsys.
In this paper we introduce a tool called Principal Image Sections Mapping - PRISM, dedicated for PyTorch, but can be easily ported to other deep learning frameworks. Presented software relies on Principal Component Analysis to visualize the most significant features recognized by a given Convolutional Neural Network. Moreover, it allows to display comparative set features between images processed in the same batch, therefore PRISM can be a method well synerging with technique Explanation by Example.
Despite the rapid progress in multihop question-answering (QA), models still have trouble explaining why an answer is correct, with limited explanation training data available to learn from. To address this, we introduce three explanation datasets in which explanations formed from corpus facts are annotated. Our first dataset, eQASC, contains over 98K explanation annotations for the multihop question answering dataset QASC, and is the first that annotates multiple candidate explanations for each answer. The second dataset eQASC-perturbed is constructed by crowd-sourcing perturbations (while preserving their validity) of a subset of explanations in QASC, to test consistency and generalization of explanation prediction models. The third dataset eOBQA is constructed by adding explanation annotations to the OBQA dataset to test generalization of models trained on eQASC. We show that this data can be used to significantly improve explanation quality (+14% absolute F1 over a strong retrieval baseline) using a BERT-based classifier, but still behind the upper bound, offering a new challenge for future research. We also explore a delexicalized chain representation in which repeated noun phrases are replaced by variables, thus turning them into generalized reasoning chains (for example: "X is a Y" AND "Y has Z" IMPLIES "X has Z"). We find that generalized chains maintain performance while also being more robust to certain perturbations.