Explainable Fashion Recommendation with Joint Outfit Matching and Comment Generation

Most previous work on fashion recommendation focuses on designing visual features to enhance recommendations. Existing work neglects user comments of fashion items, which have been proved effective in generating explanations along with better recommendation results. We propose a novel neural network framework, neural fashion recommendation (NFR), that simultaneously provides fashion recommendations and generates abstractive comments. NFR consists of two parts: outfit matching and comment generation. For outfit matching, we propose a convolutional neural network with a mutual attention mechanism to extract visual features of outfits. The visual features are then decoded into a rating score for the matching prediction. For abstractive comment generation, we propose a gated recurrent neural network with a cross-modality attention mechanism to transform visual features into a concise sentence. The two parts are jointly trained based on a multi-task learning framework in an end-to-end back-propagation paradigm. Extensive experiments conducted on an existing dataset and a collected real-world dataset show NFR achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines for fashion recommendation. Meanwhile, our generated comments achieve impressive ROUGE and BLEU scores in comparison to human-written comments. The generated comments can be regarded as explanations for the recommendation results. We release the dataset and code to facilitate future research.