Rethinking the Evaluation for Conversational Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Xiaolei, Tang, Xinyu, Zhao, Wayne Xin, Wang, Jingyuan, Wen, Ji-Rong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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_version_ 1866913397512077312
author Wang, Xiaolei
Tang, Xinyu
Zhao, Wayne Xin
Wang, Jingyuan
Wen, Ji-Rong
author_facet Wang, Xiaolei
Tang, Xinyu
Zhao, Wayne Xin
Wang, Jingyuan
Wen, Ji-Rong
contents The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential to develop more powerful conversational recommender systems (CRSs), which rely on natural language conversations to satisfy user needs. In this paper, we embark on an investigation into the utilization of ChatGPT for conversational recommendation, revealing the inadequacy of the existing evaluation protocol. It might over-emphasize the matching with the ground-truth items or utterances generated by human annotators, while neglecting the interactive nature of being a capable CRS. To overcome the limitation, we further propose an interactive Evaluation approach based on LLMs named iEvaLM that harnesses LLM-based user simulators. Our evaluation approach can simulate various interaction scenarios between users and systems. Through the experiments on two publicly available CRS datasets, we demonstrate notable improvements compared to the prevailing evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we emphasize the evaluation of explainability, and ChatGPT showcases persuasive explanation generation for its recommendations. Our study contributes to a deeper comprehension of the untapped potential of LLMs for CRSs and provides a more flexible and easy-to-use evaluation framework for future research endeavors. The codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/iEvaLM-CRS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_13112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking the Evaluation for Conversational Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models
Wang, Xiaolei
Tang, Xinyu
Zhao, Wayne Xin
Wang, Jingyuan
Wen, Ji-Rong
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential to develop more powerful conversational recommender systems (CRSs), which rely on natural language conversations to satisfy user needs. In this paper, we embark on an investigation into the utilization of ChatGPT for conversational recommendation, revealing the inadequacy of the existing evaluation protocol. It might over-emphasize the matching with the ground-truth items or utterances generated by human annotators, while neglecting the interactive nature of being a capable CRS. To overcome the limitation, we further propose an interactive Evaluation approach based on LLMs named iEvaLM that harnesses LLM-based user simulators. Our evaluation approach can simulate various interaction scenarios between users and systems. Through the experiments on two publicly available CRS datasets, we demonstrate notable improvements compared to the prevailing evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we emphasize the evaluation of explainability, and ChatGPT showcases persuasive explanation generation for its recommendations. Our study contributes to a deeper comprehension of the untapped potential of LLMs for CRSs and provides a more flexible and easy-to-use evaluation framework for future research endeavors. The codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/iEvaLM-CRS.
title Rethinking the Evaluation for Conversational Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13112