Towards Empathetic Conversational Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Xiaoyu, Xie, Ruobing, Lyu, Yougang, Xin, Xin, Ren, Pengjie, Liang, Mingfei, Zhang, Bo, Kang, Zhanhui, de Rijke, Maarten, Ren, Zhaochun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhang, Xiaoyu
Xie, Ruobing
Lyu, Yougang
Xin, Xin
Ren, Pengjie
Liang, Mingfei
Zhang, Bo
Kang, Zhanhui
de Rijke, Maarten
Ren, Zhaochun
author_facet Zhang, Xiaoyu
Xie, Ruobing
Lyu, Yougang
Xin, Xin
Ren, Pengjie
Liang, Mingfei
Zhang, Bo
Kang, Zhanhui
de Rijke, Maarten
Ren, Zhaochun
contents Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are able to elicit user preferences through multi-turn dialogues. They typically incorporate external knowledge and pre-trained language models to capture the dialogue context. Most CRS approaches, trained on benchmark datasets, assume that the standard items and responses in these benchmarks are optimal. However, they overlook that users may express negative emotions with the standard items and may not feel emotionally engaged by the standard responses. This issue leads to a tendency to replicate the logic of recommenders in the dataset instead of aligning with user needs. To remedy this misalignment, we introduce empathy within a CRS. With empathy we refer to a system's ability to capture and express emotions. We propose an empathetic conversational recommender (ECR) framework. ECR contains two main modules: emotion-aware item recommendation and emotion-aligned response generation. Specifically, we employ user emotions to refine user preference modeling for accurate recommendations. To generate human-like emotional responses, ECR applies retrieval-augmented prompts to fine-tune a pre-trained language model aligning with emotions and mitigating hallucination. To address the challenge of insufficient supervision labels, we enlarge our empathetic data using emotion labels annotated by large language models and emotional reviews collected from external resources. We propose novel evaluation metrics to capture user satisfaction in real-world CRS scenarios. Our experiments on the ReDial dataset validate the efficacy of our framework in enhancing recommendation accuracy and improving user satisfaction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_10527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Empathetic Conversational Recommender Systems
Zhang, Xiaoyu
Xie, Ruobing
Lyu, Yougang
Xin, Xin
Ren, Pengjie
Liang, Mingfei
Zhang, Bo
Kang, Zhanhui
de Rijke, Maarten
Ren, Zhaochun
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are able to elicit user preferences through multi-turn dialogues. They typically incorporate external knowledge and pre-trained language models to capture the dialogue context. Most CRS approaches, trained on benchmark datasets, assume that the standard items and responses in these benchmarks are optimal. However, they overlook that users may express negative emotions with the standard items and may not feel emotionally engaged by the standard responses. This issue leads to a tendency to replicate the logic of recommenders in the dataset instead of aligning with user needs. To remedy this misalignment, we introduce empathy within a CRS. With empathy we refer to a system's ability to capture and express emotions. We propose an empathetic conversational recommender (ECR) framework. ECR contains two main modules: emotion-aware item recommendation and emotion-aligned response generation. Specifically, we employ user emotions to refine user preference modeling for accurate recommendations. To generate human-like emotional responses, ECR applies retrieval-augmented prompts to fine-tune a pre-trained language model aligning with emotions and mitigating hallucination. To address the challenge of insufficient supervision labels, we enlarge our empathetic data using emotion labels annotated by large language models and emotional reviews collected from external resources. We propose novel evaluation metrics to capture user satisfaction in real-world CRS scenarios. Our experiments on the ReDial dataset validate the efficacy of our framework in enhancing recommendation accuracy and improving user satisfaction.
title Towards Empathetic Conversational Recommender Systems
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10527