Techniques for generating human-readable explanations (also referred to herein as “reasons”) for navigational recommendations are disclosed. Composing a human-readable explanation includes individually selecting words or phrases that are then analyzed, combined, rearranged, modified, or removed to generate the human-readable explanation for a navigational recommendation. A decoder trains a machine learning model to generate the human-readable reasons for the navigational recommendations based on (1) historical recommendation vectors, and (2) historical human-readable reasons associated with the recommendation vectors. The system generates a dictionary of human-readable reasons for recommendations, with each entry of the dictionary including: (1) a recommendation identifier (ID) associated with a recommended navigational target, (2) a reason identifier (ID) associated with a particular reason for the recommendation, and (3) a human-readable reason associated with the reason ID.