PhD defense of Kathrin Wardatzky
Congratulations to Kathrin Wardatzky for defending her PhD thesis “How Should I Explain This? Systematic and User-Centered Evaluation of Recommender Systems Explanations” 🎉
In her dissertation, Kathrin Wardatzky investigates how explanations in recommender systems can be evaluated and what makes an explanation effective for a specific application scenario.
Her work combines two systematic literature reviews with an empirical study. The reviews examine how explanation quality is assessed in recommender systems research and how individual user characteristics influence the perceived quality of explanations. Building on these findings, Kathrin evaluates the potential of large language models for generating and assessing explanations.
The findings of these contributions culminate in a practical tool that enables researchers to evaluate explanation approaches in a holistic manner.
Kathrin was a PhD student in the Dynamic and Distributed Information Systems Group, supervised by Prof. Abraham Bernstein.