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SIGIR 2018 Workshop on ExplainAble Recommendation and Search (EARS 2018)

Explainable recommendation and search attempt to develop models or methods that not only generate high-quality recommendation or search results, but also intuitive explanations of the results for users or system designers, which can help to improve the system transparency, persuasiveness, trustworthiness, and effectiveness, etc. This is even more important in personalized search and recommendation scenarios, where users would like to know why a particular product, web page, news report, or friend suggestion exists in his or her own search and recommendation lists. The motivation of the workshop is to promote the research and application of Explainable Recommendation and Search, under the background of Explainable AI in a more general sense. Early recommendation and search systems adopted intuitive yet easily explainable models to generate recommendation and search lists, such as user-based and item-based collaborative filtering for recommendation, which provide recommendations based on similar users or items, or TF-IDF based retrieval models for search, which provide document ranking lists according to word similarity between different documents. However, state-of-the-art recommendation and search models extensively rely on complex machine learning and latent representation models such as matrix factorization or even deep neural networks, and they work with various types of information sources such as ratings, text, images, audio or video signals. The complexity nature of state-of-the-art models make search and recommendation systems as blank-boxes for end users, and the lack of explainability weakens the persuasiveness and trustworthiness of the system for users, making explainable recommendation and search important research issues to the IR community. In a broader sense, researchers in the whole artificial intelligence community have also realized the importance of Explainable AI, which aims to address a wide range of AI explainability problems in deep learning, computer vision, automatic driving systems, and natural language processing tasks. As an important branch of AI research, this further highlights the importance and urgency for our IR/RecSys community to address the explainability issues of various recommendation and search systems.