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Qualifying Exam
3/14/2019 03:00 pm
CoRE 305 (B)

Generating Explanation Sentences for Personalized Recommendation

Hanxiong Chen, Dept. of Computer Science

Examination Committee: Prof. Yongfeng Zhang (Chair), Prof. Matthew Stone, Prof. Gerard de Melo, Prof. Desheng Zhang

Abstract

Current explainable recommendation models mostly generate textual explanations based on pre-defined sentence templates. However, the expressiveness power of template-based explanation sentences is limited to the pre-defined expressions, and manually defining the expressions require significant human efforts. We propose a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence model for personalized explanation generation. Different from conventional sentence generation in NLP research, a great challenge of explanation generation in e-commerce recommendation is that not all sentences in user reviews are of explanation purpose. To solve the problem, we further propose an auto-denoising mechanism based on topical item feature words for sentence generation.