Towards Explainable Temporal User Profiling with LLMs

Abstract: Accurately modeling user preferences is vital not only for improving recommendation performance but also for enhancing transparency in recommender systems. Conventional user profiling methods, such as averaging item embeddings, often overlook the evolving, nuanced nature of user interests, particularly the interplay between short-term and long-term preferences. In this work, we leverage LLMs to generate natural language summaries of users' interaction histories, distinguishing recent behaviors from more persistent tendencies. Our framework not only models temporal user preferences but also produces natural language profiles that can be used to explain recommendations in an interpretable manner. These textual profiles are encoded via a pre-trained model, and an attention mechanism dynamically fuses the short-term and long-term embeddings into a comprehensive user representation. Beyond boosting recommendation accuracy over multiple baselines, our approach naturally supports explainability: the interpretable text summaries and attention weights can be exposed to end users, offering insights into why specific items are suggested. Experiments on real-world datasets underscore both the performance gains and the promise of generating clearer, more transparent justifications for content-based recommendations.