“Tell Me Why”: using natural language justifications in a recipe recommender system to support healthier food choices

Abstract Users of online recipe websites tend to prefer unhealthy foods. Their popularity undermines the healthiness of traditional food recommender systems, as many users lack nutritional knowledge to make informed food decisions. Moreover, the presented information is often unrelated to nutrition or difficult to understand. To alleviate this, we present a methodology to generate natural language justifications that emphasize the nutritional content, health risks, or benefits of recommended recipes. Our framework takes a user and two recipes as input and produces an automatically generated natural language justification as output, based on the user’s characteristics and the recipes’ features, following a knowledge-based recommendation approach. We evaluated our methodology in two crowdsourcing studies. In Study 1 ( $$N=502$$ N = 502 ), we compared user food choices for two personalized recommendation approaches, based on either a (1) single-style justification or (2) comparative justification was shown, using a no justification baseline. The recommendations were either popularity-based or health-aware, the latter based on the health and nutritional needs of the user. We found that comparative justification styles were effective in supporting choices for our health-aware recommendations, confirming the impact of our methodology on food choices. In Study 2 ( $$N=504$$ N = 504 ), we used the same methodology to compare the effectiveness of eight different comparative justification strategies. We presented pairs of recipes twice to users: once without and once with a pairwise justification. Results indicated that justifications led to significantly healthier choices for first course meals, while strategies that compared food features and emphasized health risks, benefits, and a user’s lifestyle were most effective, catering to health-related choice motivations.