Factual Consistency of Explainable Recommendation Models
Analysis
Key Takeaways
- •Explainable recommendation models often generate explanations that are not factually consistent with the evidence.
- •A new framework is introduced to evaluate the factual consistency of these models.
- •Current models show a significant gap between fluency and factuality.
- •Factuality-aware evaluation is crucial for building trustworthy recommendation systems.
“While models achieve high semantic similarity scores (BERTScore F1: 0.81-0.90), all our factuality metrics reveal alarmingly low performance (LLM-based statement-level precision: 4.38%-32.88%).”