To Recommend or Not: Recommendability Identification in Conversations with Pre-trained Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Zhefan, Ma, Weizhi, Zhang, Min
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wang, Zhefan
Ma, Weizhi
Zhang, Min
author_facet Wang, Zhefan
Ma, Weizhi
Zhang, Min
contents Most current recommender systems primarily focus on what to recommend, assuming users always require personalized recommendations. However, with the widely spread of ChatGPT and other chatbots, a more crucial problem in the context of conversational systems is how to minimize user disruption when we provide recommendation services for users. While previous research has extensively explored different user intents in dialogue systems, fewer efforts are made to investigate whether recommendations should be provided. In this paper, we formally define the recommendability identification problem, which aims to determine whether recommendations are necessary in a specific scenario. First, we propose and define the recommendability identification task, which investigates the need for recommendations in the current conversational context. A new dataset is constructed. Subsequently, we discuss and evaluate the feasibility of leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) for recommendability identification. Finally, through comparative experiments, we demonstrate that directly employing PLMs with zero-shot results falls short of meeting the task requirements. Besides, fine-tuning or utilizing soft prompt techniques yields comparable results to traditional classification methods. Our work is the first to study recommendability before recommendation and provides preliminary ways to make it a fundamental component of the future recommendation system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_18628
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Recommend or Not: Recommendability Identification in Conversations with Pre-trained Language Models
Wang, Zhefan
Ma, Weizhi
Zhang, Min
Information Retrieval
Most current recommender systems primarily focus on what to recommend, assuming users always require personalized recommendations. However, with the widely spread of ChatGPT and other chatbots, a more crucial problem in the context of conversational systems is how to minimize user disruption when we provide recommendation services for users. While previous research has extensively explored different user intents in dialogue systems, fewer efforts are made to investigate whether recommendations should be provided. In this paper, we formally define the recommendability identification problem, which aims to determine whether recommendations are necessary in a specific scenario. First, we propose and define the recommendability identification task, which investigates the need for recommendations in the current conversational context. A new dataset is constructed. Subsequently, we discuss and evaluate the feasibility of leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) for recommendability identification. Finally, through comparative experiments, we demonstrate that directly employing PLMs with zero-shot results falls short of meeting the task requirements. Besides, fine-tuning or utilizing soft prompt techniques yields comparable results to traditional classification methods. Our work is the first to study recommendability before recommendation and provides preliminary ways to make it a fundamental component of the future recommendation system.
title To Recommend or Not: Recommendability Identification in Conversations with Pre-trained Language Models
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.18628