Knowledge-Aware Explainable Reciprocal Recommendation

Abstract

Reciprocal recommender systems (RRS) have been widely used in online platforms such as online dating and recruitment. They can simultaneously fulfill the needs of both parties involved in the recommendation process. Due to the inherent nature of the task, interaction data is relatively sparse compared to other recommendation tasks. Existing works mainly address this issue through content-based recommendation methods. However, these methods often implicitly model textual information from a unified perspective, making it challenging to capture the distinct intentions held by each party, which further leads to limited performance and the lack of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Explainable Reciprocal Recommender System (KAERR), which models metapaths between two parties independently, considering their respective perspectives and requirements. Various metapaths are fused using an attention-based mechanism, where the attention weights unveil dual-perspective preferences and provide recommendation explanations for both parties. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets from diverse scenarios demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, while also delivering compelling reasons for recommendations to both parties.