Synthesizing Aspect-Driven Recommendation Explanations from Reviews

Explanations help to make sense of recommendations, increasing the likelihood of adoption. However, existing approaches to explainable recommendations tend to rely on rigid, standardized templates, customized only via fill-in-the-blank aspect sentiments. For more flexible, literate, and varied explanations covering various aspects of interest, we synthesize an explanation by selecting snippets from reviews, while optimizing for representativeness and coherence. To fit target users' aspect preferences, we contextualize the opinions based on a compatible explainable recommendation model. Experiments on datasets of several product categories showcase the efficacies of our method as compared to baselines based on templates, review summarization, selection, and text generation.