Generating and selecting recommendation explanations for personalized recommendations may include retrieving in response to at least one recommendation query, a document from a corpora of available documents for consumption by a user. The at least one recommendation query may be associated with a corresponding plurality of candidate recommendation explanations. The plurality of recommendation explanations for the document may be ranked based on popularity of at least one of the plurality of recommendation explanations when previously provided to the user and/or popularity of the document among a plurality of users under each of the plurality of recommendation explanations. The popularity of at least one of the plurality of recommendation explanations previously provided to the user may be based on document engagement history associated with the user when the at least one of the plurality of recommendation explanations were previously provided to the user.