Boosting Course Recommendation Explainability: A Knowledge Entity Aware Model Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Course recommender systems can assist students in identifying suitable or appealing courses by leveraging user interaction data. However, a prevalent issue with existing course recommender systems is their tendency to prioritize accuracy over explainability. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Knowledge Entity-Aware Model for course recommendation called KEAM, which supports explicit user profile generation based on detailed information from a knowledge graph to enhance comprehension of the students. Specifically, we exploit the information within knowledge graphs using neural networks. Then, KEAM captures students' preferences and creates profiles for explainable recommendations. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two datasets to verify the effectiveness and explainability of KEAM.