Aspect-Enhanced Explainable Recommendation with Multi-modal Contrastive Learning

Explainable recommender systems (ERS) aim to enhance users’ trust in the systems by offering personalized recommendations with transparent explanations. This transparency provides users with a clear understanding of the rationale behind the recommendations, fostering a sense of confidence and reliability in the system’s outputs. Generally, the explanations are presented in a familiar and intuitive way, which is in the form of natural language, thus enhancing their accessibility to users. Recently, there has been an increasing focus on leveraging reviews as a valuable source of rich information in both modeling user-item preferences and generating textual interpretations, which can be performed simultaneously in a multi-task framework. Despite the progress made in these review-based recommendation systems, the integration of implicit feedback derived from user-item interactions and user-written text reviews has yet to be fully explored. To fill this gap, we propose a model named SERMON (Aspect-enhanced Explainable Recommendation with Multi-modal Contrast Learning). Our model explores the application of multimodal contrastive learning to facilitate reciprocal learning across two modalities, thereby enhancing the modeling of user preferences. Moreover, our model incorporates the aspect information extracted from the review, which provides two significant enhancements to our tasks. Firstly, the quality of the generated explanations is improved by incorporating the aspect characteristics into the explanations generated by a pre-trained model with controlled textual generation ability. Secondly, the commonly used user-item interactions are transformed into user-item-aspect interactions, which we refer to as interaction triple, resulting in a more nuanced representation of user preference. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with a 2.0% improvement in prediction accuracy and a substantial 24.5% enhancement in explanation quality for the TripAdvisor dataset.