Explaining Contextual Recommendations: Interaction Design Study and Prototype Implementation

We describe an architecture for generating context-aware recommendations along with detailed textual explanations to support the user in the decision-making process. CARE (Context-Aware Recommender with Explanation) incorporates a hierarchical structure, in which independent modules embodying different aspects of the context cooperate together to generate recommendations for the user with accompanying rationales. We follow the Interaction Design principles to develop personas, goals and user scenarios, based on which a prototype system is developed. We present here two examples of its performance when processing movieratings data set with contextual information. We argue that our architecture is extensible in that more modules can be added as needed, and the approach can be applied to other domains as well.