Reliable Recommendation with Review-level Explanations

The quality of user-generated reviews is significant for users to understand recommendation results and make online purchasing decisions correctly. However, the reliability of a review, which captures the likelihood that a review is benign, is ignored by many studies. The low reliability reviews cause a recommendation system’s unsatisfying performance. Especially the fake reviews written by fraudulent users mislead the system into generating error recommendation results and explanations, which confuse customers and deprive customers of confidence in the system. In this paper, we propose a model, Reliable Recommendation with Review-level Explanations (RRRE), which detects reliable reviews and improves the performance of the explainable recommendation system as well. Recognizing the textual content of reviews, user-item interactions are valuable features for both rating prediction and reliability prediction. RRRE builds a uniform framework to predict rating scores and reliability scores simultaneously. Firstly, RRRE embeds user preferences and item profiles, which are extracted from textual and interactive features, into the representation of the review. Secondly, the supervised information of two subtasks is jointly combined. It makes the optimization of RRRE faster and better. Finally, the reviews with both high reliability scores and rating scores are given to customers as reliable explanations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to consider the reliability of reviews for improving explainable recommender system. And the experimental results confirm this idea and show that our model outperforms other baseline methods on Yelp and Amazon datasets.