On Mitigating Data Sparsity in Conversational Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Sixiao, Liu, Mingrui, Long, Cheng, Yuan, Wei, Chen, Hongxu, Zhao, Xiangyu, Yin, Hongzhi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhang, Sixiao
Liu, Mingrui
Long, Cheng
Yuan, Wei
Chen, Hongxu
Zhao, Xiangyu
Yin, Hongzhi
author_facet Zhang, Sixiao
Liu, Mingrui
Long, Cheng
Yuan, Wei
Chen, Hongxu
Zhao, Xiangyu
Yin, Hongzhi
contents Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) capture user preference through textual information in dialogues. However, they suffer from data sparsity on two fronts: the dialogue space is vast and linguistically diverse, while the item space exhibits long-tail and sparse distributions. Existing methods struggle with (1) generalizing to varied dialogue expressions due to underutilization of rich textual cues, and (2) learning informative item representations under severe sparsity. To address these problems, we propose a CRS model named DACRS. It consists of three modules, namely Dialogue Augmentation, Knowledge-Guided Entity Modeling, and Dialogue-Entity Matching. In the Dialogue Augmentation module, we apply a two-stage augmentation pipeline to augment the dialogue context to enrich the data and improve generalizability. In the Knowledge-Guided Entity Modeling, we propose a knowledge graph (KG) based entity substitution and an entity similarity constraint to enhance the expressiveness of entity embeddings. In the Dialogue-Entity Matching module, we fuse the dialogue embedding with the mentioned entity embeddings through a dialogue-guided attention aggregation to acquire user embeddings that contain both the explicit and implicit user preferences. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DACRS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_00479
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Mitigating Data Sparsity in Conversational Recommender Systems
Zhang, Sixiao
Liu, Mingrui
Long, Cheng
Yuan, Wei
Chen, Hongxu
Zhao, Xiangyu
Yin, Hongzhi
Information Retrieval
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) capture user preference through textual information in dialogues. However, they suffer from data sparsity on two fronts: the dialogue space is vast and linguistically diverse, while the item space exhibits long-tail and sparse distributions. Existing methods struggle with (1) generalizing to varied dialogue expressions due to underutilization of rich textual cues, and (2) learning informative item representations under severe sparsity. To address these problems, we propose a CRS model named DACRS. It consists of three modules, namely Dialogue Augmentation, Knowledge-Guided Entity Modeling, and Dialogue-Entity Matching. In the Dialogue Augmentation module, we apply a two-stage augmentation pipeline to augment the dialogue context to enrich the data and improve generalizability. In the Knowledge-Guided Entity Modeling, we propose a knowledge graph (KG) based entity substitution and an entity similarity constraint to enhance the expressiveness of entity embeddings. In the Dialogue-Entity Matching module, we fuse the dialogue embedding with the mentioned entity embeddings through a dialogue-guided attention aggregation to acquire user embeddings that contain both the explicit and implicit user preferences. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DACRS.
title On Mitigating Data Sparsity in Conversational Recommender Systems
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00479