Papers with conversational recommender systems
CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System (2021.acl-demo)
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Kun Zhou, Xiaolei Wang, Yuanhang Zhou, Chenzhan Shang, Yuan Cheng, Wayne Xin Zhao, Yaliang Li, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on conversational recommender systems lack a unified and standardized implementation or comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a unified framework and highly-decoupled modules to develop CRSs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework collects 6 commonly used human-annotated CRS datasets and implements 19 models that include advanced techniques such as graph neural networks and pre-training models. |
Evaluating Large Language Models as Generative User Simulators for Conversational Recommendation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models show promise in simulating human-like behavior, raising the question of their ability to represent a diverse population of users. |
| Approach: | They propose a protocol to evaluate the degree to which language models can accurately emulate human behavior in conversational recommendation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol evaluates five tasks to reveal deviations of language models from human behavior and offers insights on how to reduce deviations with model selection and prompting strategies. |
LLM-based Conversational Recommendation Agents with Collaborative Verbalized Experience (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in conversational recommender systems (CRS). |
| Approach: | They propose LLM-based CRS-based LLMs with Collaborative Verbalized Experience to enhance historical conversations by sampling trajectories of LLM agents on historical queries and establishing verbalized experience banks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on existing approaches to enhancing historical conversations by leveraging trajectories and verbalized experiences from LLMs on historical queries and user feedback. |
LLM-REDIAL: A Large-Scale Dataset for Conversational Recommender Systems Created from User Behaviors with LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing CRS datasets suffer from data inextensibility and semantic inconsistency . |
| Approach: | They introduce the LLM-REDIAL dataset to facilitate the research in CRS by leveraging large language models to generate high-quality dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest multi-domain CRS dataset which consists of 47.6k multi-turn dialogues with 482.6k utterances across 4 domains. |
Rethinking the Evaluation for Conversational Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation protocols for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate for conversational recommender systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation approach based on LLMs that harnesses LLM-based user simulators to evaluate ChatGPT's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation approach can simulate various system-user interaction scenarios. |
Salespeople vs SalesBot: Exploring the Role of Educational Value in Conversational Recommender Systems (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational recommender systems focus on a single-shot approach to understand user preferences and provide recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a problem space for conversational agents that aim to provide both product recommendations and educational value through mixed-type mixed-initiative dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can simulate salesbot and shopperbot agents and provide both product recommendations and educational value through mixed-type mixed-initiative dialog. |
Data-Efficient Adaptation to Contextual Shifts in LLM-based Conversational Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods struggle to distinguish learnable samples under contextual shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework agnostic to underlying large language model-based conversational recommender systems (CRSs) that captures user preferences through free-form conversations and generates contextually relevant recommendations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on three CRS benchmarks with real-world temporal splits. |