Knowledgeable Explanations for Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems (RS) serve online customers in identifying those items from a variety of choices that best match their needs and preferences. In this context explanations summarize the reasons why a specific item is proposed and strongly increase the users' trust in the system's results. In this paper we propose a framework for generating knowledgeable explanations that exploits domain knowledge to transparently argue why a recommended item matches the user's preferences. Furthermore, results of an online experiment on a real-world platform show that users' perception of the usability of a recommender system is positively influenced by knowledgeable explanations and that consequently users' experience in interacting with the system, their intention to use it repeatedly as well as their commitment to recommend it to others are increased.