Q&A driven conversational recommendation integrating multiple interest modeling

The conversational recommendation aims to provide users with recommendations in an interaction form of “System Ask-User Respond”. Existing studies rarely consider combining users’ multi-interest at the attribute level for preference modeling, and conduct inefficient conversational recommendation strategy learning, which affects the recommendation performance and conversation performance. To this end, we proposed a Q-A driven conversational recommendation method integrating multiple interest modeling. Specifically, we integrate the user’s positive and negative feedback to model a session dynamic graph, then use the signed graph convolutional network for graph representation learning, and we model multiple interest sequences based on the attention mechanism, then obtain the user interest state representation by fusing of sequence representations to solve the problem of insufficient user preference representation. Besides, we proposed a personalized decision space optimization method to narrow the range of action candidates and train the model with a multi-agent reinforcement learning method integrating hierarchical decision debiasing to solve the problem of poor conversational recommendation strategy learning effect. Experimental results on three public datasets, LastFM, Yelp, and Book, show that compared with existing conversational recommendation methods, our method demonstrates consistent performance improvement across all datasets. In addition, the results of ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of each component in our method.