Improved conversational recommender system based on dialog context

Abstract

Conversational recommender system (CRS) needs to be seamlessly integrated between the two modules of recommendation and dialog, aiming to recommend high-quality items to users through multiple rounds of interactive dialogs. Items can typically refer to goods, movies, news, etc. Through this form of interactive dialog, users can express their preferences in real time, and the system can fully understand the user’s thoughts and recommend corresponding items. Although mainstream dialog recommendation systems have improved the performance to some extent, there are still some key issues, such as insufficient consideration of the entity’s order in the dialog, the different contributions of items in the dialog history, and the low diversity of generated responses. To address these shortcomings, we propose an improved dialog context model based on time-series features. Firstly, we augment the semantic representation of words and items using two external knowledge graphs and align the semantic space using mutual information maximization techniques. Secondly, we add a retrieval model to the dialog recommendation system to provide auxiliary information for generating replies. We then utilize a deep timing network to serialize the dialog content and more accurately learn the feature relationship between users and items for recommendation. In this paper, the dialog recommendation system is divided into two components, and different evaluation indicators are used to evaluate the performance of the dialog component and the recommendation component. Experimental results on widely used benchmarks show that the proposed method is effective.