Explanations in recommender systems: an overview

Personalisation of product and services is one of the most important aspects in e-commerce and web-based companies. Recommender system is the technology that helps build personalisation features. One promising and emerging area in the field of recommender systems is explanations. Explanation is the reasoning behind the information presented about a recommendation and plays an important role in helping the user evaluate the recommendation received on websites related to e-commerce, social networking, search engines, etc. In this paper, we present an overview of this emerging concept of explanation which is important in present day context as an aid for overcoming information overload. Present status of research in this field is discussed on the three important areas-objectives and evaluation of performance of explanations, effect of explanation interfaces on the users and the growing influence of explanations in social networking sites. We conclude the paper with discussions on areas of future research in this upcoming field which can be of academic interest to the researchers and of practical utility to the system designers of recommender systems for increasing its effectiveness.