Cognition-aware Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Explainable Recommendation

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have been widely used in recommendation systems to improve recommendation accuracy and interpretability effectively. Recent research usually endows KG reasoning to find the multi-hop user-item connection paths for explaining why an item is recommended. The existing path-finding process is well designed by logic-driven inference algorithms, while there exists a gap between how algorithms and users perceive the reasoning process. Factually, human thinking is a natural reasoning process that can provide more proper and convincing explanations of why particular decisions are made. Motivated by the Dual Process Theory in cognitive science, we propose a cognition-aware KG reasoning model CogER for Explainable Recommendation, which imitates the human cognition process and designs two modules, i.e., System~1 (making intuitive judgment) and System~2 (conducting explicit reasoning), to generate the actual decision-making process. At each step during the cognition-aware reasoning process, System~1 generates an intuitive estimation of the next-step entity based on the user's historical behavior, and System~2 conducts explicit reasoning and selects the most promising knowledge entities. These two modules work iteratively and are mutually complementary, enabling our model to yield high-quality recommendations and proper reasoning paths. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our model achieves better recommendation results with explanations compared with previous methods.