Automatic Generation of Natural Language Explanations

An important task for recommender system is to generate explanations according to a user's preferences. Most of the current methods for explainable recommendations use structured sentences to provide descriptions along with the recommendations they produce. However, those methods have neglected the review-oriented way of writing a text, even though it is known that these reviews have a strong influence over user's decision. In this paper, we propose a method for the automatic generation of natural language explanations, for predicting how a user would write about an item, based on user ratings from different items' features. We design a character-level recurrent neural network (RNN) model, which generates an item's review explanations using long-short term memories (LSTM). The model generates text reviews given a combination of the review and ratings score that express opinions about different factors or aspects of an item. Our network is trained on a sub-sample from the large real-world dataset BeerAdvocate. Our empirical evaluation using natural language processing metrics shows the generated text's quality is close to a real user written review, identifying negation, misspellings, and domain specific vocabulary.