Explain and Conquer: Personalised Text-based Reviews to Achieve Transparency

There are many contexts in which dyadic data are present. Social networks are a well-known example. In these contexts, pairs of elements are linked building a network that reflects interactions. Explaining why these relationships are established is essential to obtain transparency, an increasingly important notion. These explanations are often presented using text, thanks to the spread of the natural language understanding tasks. Our aim is to represent and explain pairs established by any agent (e.g., a recommender system or a paid promotion mechanism), so that text-based personalisation is taken into account. We have focused on the TripAdvisor platform, considering the applicability to other dyadic data contexts. The items are a subset of users and restaurants and the interactions the reviews posted by these users. We propose the PTER (Personalised TExt-based Reviews) model. We predict, from the available reviews for a given restaurant, those that fit to the specific user interactions. PTER leverages the BERT (Bidirectional Encoders Representations from Transformers) transformer-encoder model. We customised a deep neural network following the feature-based approach, presenting a LTR (Learning To Rank) downstream task. We carried out several comparisons of our proposal with a random baseline and other models of the state of the art, following the EXTRA (EXplanaTion RAnking) benchmark. Our method outperforms other collaborative filtering proposals.