Recommender systems are widely used for assisting consumers finding interested products, and providing suitable explanations for recommendation is particularly important for enhancing consumersโ trust and satisfaction with the system. Tags can be used to annotate different types of items, yet their potential for providing interpretability is not well studied previously. Therefore, it is worthy to study how to leverage tags to enhance recommendation systems in terms of both interpretability and accuracy. This paper proposes a novel model that seamlessly fuse topic model and recommendation model, where the topic model can analyze tags to infer understandable topics, and the recommendation model can conduct accurate and interpretable recommendations based on these topics. We develop variational auto-encoding method to take advantage of neural networks to infer model parameters. Experiments on real-world datasets illustrate that the proposed method can not only achieve great recommendation performance, but also provide interpretability for the recommendation results
