Whom do Explanations Serve? A Systematic Literature Survey of User Characteristics in Explainable Recommender Systems Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wardatzky, Kathrin, Inel, Oana, Rossetto, Luca, Bernstein, Abraham
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wardatzky, Kathrin
Inel, Oana
Rossetto, Luca
Bernstein, Abraham
author_facet Wardatzky, Kathrin
Inel, Oana
Rossetto, Luca
Bernstein, Abraham
contents Adding explanations to recommender systems is said to have multiple benefits, such as increasing user trust or system transparency. Previous work from other application areas suggests that specific user characteristics impact the users' perception of the explanation. However, we rarely find this type of evaluation for recommender systems explanations. This paper addresses this gap by surveying 124 papers in which recommender systems explanations were evaluated in user studies. We analyzed their participant descriptions and study results where the impact of user characteristics on the explanation effects was measured. Our findings suggest that the results from the surveyed studies predominantly cover specific users who do not necessarily represent the users of recommender systems in the evaluation domain. This may seriously hamper the generalizability of any insights we may gain from current studies on explanations in recommender systems. We further find inconsistencies in the data reporting, which impacts the reproducibility of the reported results. Hence, we recommend actions to move toward a more inclusive and reproducible evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_14193
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Whom do Explanations Serve? A Systematic Literature Survey of User Characteristics in Explainable Recommender Systems Evaluation
Wardatzky, Kathrin
Inel, Oana
Rossetto, Luca
Bernstein, Abraham
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
A.1; H.3.3; H.5.2; K.4
Adding explanations to recommender systems is said to have multiple benefits, such as increasing user trust or system transparency. Previous work from other application areas suggests that specific user characteristics impact the users' perception of the explanation. However, we rarely find this type of evaluation for recommender systems explanations. This paper addresses this gap by surveying 124 papers in which recommender systems explanations were evaluated in user studies. We analyzed their participant descriptions and study results where the impact of user characteristics on the explanation effects was measured. Our findings suggest that the results from the surveyed studies predominantly cover specific users who do not necessarily represent the users of recommender systems in the evaluation domain. This may seriously hamper the generalizability of any insights we may gain from current studies on explanations in recommender systems. We further find inconsistencies in the data reporting, which impacts the reproducibility of the reported results. Hence, we recommend actions to move toward a more inclusive and reproducible evaluation.
title Whom do Explanations Serve? A Systematic Literature Survey of User Characteristics in Explainable Recommender Systems Evaluation
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
A.1; H.3.3; H.5.2; K.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14193