SoREX: Towards Self-Explainable Social Recommendation with Relevant Ego-Path Extraction

Social recommendation has been proven effective in addressing data sparsity in user-item interaction modeling by leveraging social networks. The recent integration of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has further enhanced prediction accuracy in contemporary social recommendation algorithms. However, many GNN-based approaches in social recommendation lack the ability to furnish meaningful explanations for their predictions. In this study, we confront this challenge by introducing SoREX, a self-explanatory GNN-based social recommendation framework. SoREX adopts a two-tower framework enhanced by friend recommendation, independently modeling social relations and user-item interactions, while jointly optimizing an auxiliary task to reinforce social signals. To offer explanations, we propose a novel ego-path extraction approach. This method involves transforming the ego-net of a target user into a collection of multi-hop ego-paths, from which we extract factor-specific and candidate-aware ego-path subsets as explanations. This process facilitates the summarization of detailed comparative explanations among different candidate items through intricate substructure analysis. Furthermore, we conduct explanation re-aggregation to explicitly correlate explanations with downstream predictions, imbuing our framework with inherent self-explainability. Comprehensive experiments conducted on four widely adopted benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of SoREX in predictive accuracy. Additionally, qualitative and quantitative analyses confirm the efficacy of the extracted explanations in SoREX. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/antman9914/SoREX.