User-Centric Conversational Recommendation with Multi-Aspect User Modeling

Abstract

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to provide highquality recommendations in conversations. However, most conventional CRS models mainly focus on the dialogue understanding of the current session, ignoring other rich multi-aspect information of the central subjects (i.e., users) in recommendation. In this work, we highlight that the user's historical dialogue sessions and look-alike users are essential sources of user preferences besides the current dialogue session in CRS. To systematically model the multi-aspect information, we propose a User-Centric Conversational Recommendation (UCCR) model, which returns to the essence of user preference learning in CRS tasks. Specifically, we propose a historical session learner to capture users' multi-view preferences from knowledge, semantic, and consuming views as supplements to the current preference signals. A multi-view preference mapper is conducted to learn the intrinsic correlations among different views in current and historical sessions via self-supervised objectives. We also design a temporal look-alike user selector to understand users via their similar users. The learned multi-aspect multi-view user preferences are then used for the recommendation and dialogue generation. In experiments, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on both Chinese and English CRS datasets. The significant improvements over competitive models in both recommendation and dialogue generation verify the superiority of UCCR.

arXiv commentAccepted by SIGIR 2022

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Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Variational Reasoning over Incomplete Knowledge Graphs for Conversational Recommendation
• Towards Empathetic Conversational Recommender Systems
• Alleviating the Long-Tail Problem in Conversational Recommender Systems
• Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems via Counterfactual Data Simulation
• Knowledge-Enhanced Conversational Recommendation via Transformer-based Sequential Modelling
• Towards Building Voice-based Conversational Recommender Systems: Datasets, Potential Solutions, and Prospects
• MSCRS: Multi-modal Semantic Graph Prompt Learning Framework for Conversational Recommender Systems
• Improving Conversational Recommendation with Contextual Adaptation of External Recommenders and LLM-based Reranking