Empowering reciprocal recommender system using contextual bandits and argumentation based explanations.

Reciprocal Recommender Systems (RRS) aim to recommend relevant matches to users based on the mutual agreement of their preferences. Explainability of reciprocal recommendations is important for developing a persuasive reciprocal recommender system, since it can improve the effectiveness and credibility of the reciprocal recommendation results. Explainable RRS provide an explanation highlighting why a recommendation would be relevant to the user. Explaining the rationale behind predictions with textual or visual artifacts help in increasing trustworthiness and transparency of the system which is crucial especially for models that are used in critical decision making. In this work, XSiameseBiGRU-UCB, a deep learning contextual bandits framework with post-hoc argumentation based explanations for RRS is proposed. XSiameseBiGRU-UCB is an explainable Siamese neural network-based framework that provides explanations to justify the generated reciprocal recommendations for both the parties involved. In RRS, dilemma between exploitation and exploration requires identifying the best possible recommendation from known information or collecting more information about the environment while generating reciprocal recommendations. To tackle this, we propose to use a contextual bandit policy with upper confidence bound, which adaptively exploits and explores user interests to achieve increased rewards in the long run. Experimental studies conducted with four real-world datasets validate the efficacy of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]