The Rutgers Computer Science Department is pleased to announce that Professor Yongfeng Zhang is the recipient of the 2024 ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award for his research on Explainable Recommender Systems.
The paper "Explicit Factor Models for Explainable Recommendation based on Phrase-level Sentiment Analysis," which was published in SIGIR 2014 with Professor Zhang as the first author, proposed one of the first models that enable recommender systems to not only generate recommendations but also provide explanations to users regarding why certain items are recommended -- an important step towards trustworthy recommender systems and trustworthy AI on the web.
The SIGIR Test of Time Award recognizes research that has had long-lasting influence, including impact on a subarea of information retrieval research, across subareas of information retrieval research, and outside of the information retrieval research community (e.g. non-information retrieval research or industry). The winning paper is selected from the set of full papers presented at the main SIGIR conference 10-12 years before.
