Using LLMs to Capture Users' Temporal Context for Recommendation

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Main Authors: Sabouri, Milad, Mansoury, Masoud, Lin, Kun, Mobasher, Bamshad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sabouri, Milad
Mansoury, Masoud
Lin, Kun
Mobasher, Bamshad
author_facet Sabouri, Milad
Mansoury, Masoud
Lin, Kun
Mobasher, Bamshad
contents Effective recommender systems demand dynamic user understanding, especially in complex, evolving environments. Traditional user profiling often fails to capture the nuanced, temporal contextual factors of user preferences, such as transient short-term interests and enduring long-term tastes. This paper presents an assessment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating semantically rich, time-aware user profiles. We do not propose a novel end-to-end recommendation architecture; instead, the core contribution is a systematic investigation into the degree of LLM effectiveness in capturing the dynamics of user context by disentangling short-term and long-term preferences. This approach, framing temporal preferences as dynamic user contexts for recommendations, adaptively fuses these distinct contextual components into comprehensive user embeddings. The evaluation across Movies&TV and Video Games domains suggests that while LLM-generated profiles offer semantic depth and temporal structure, their effectiveness for context-aware recommendations is notably contingent on the richness of user interaction histories. Significant gains are observed in dense domains (e.g., Movies&TV), whereas improvements are less pronounced in sparse environments (e.g., Video Games). This work highlights LLMs' nuanced potential in enhancing user profiling for adaptive, context-aware recommendations, emphasizing the critical role of dataset characteristics for practical applicability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08512
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Using LLMs to Capture Users' Temporal Context for Recommendation
Sabouri, Milad
Mansoury, Masoud
Lin, Kun
Mobasher, Bamshad
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Effective recommender systems demand dynamic user understanding, especially in complex, evolving environments. Traditional user profiling often fails to capture the nuanced, temporal contextual factors of user preferences, such as transient short-term interests and enduring long-term tastes. This paper presents an assessment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating semantically rich, time-aware user profiles. We do not propose a novel end-to-end recommendation architecture; instead, the core contribution is a systematic investigation into the degree of LLM effectiveness in capturing the dynamics of user context by disentangling short-term and long-term preferences. This approach, framing temporal preferences as dynamic user contexts for recommendations, adaptively fuses these distinct contextual components into comprehensive user embeddings. The evaluation across Movies&TV and Video Games domains suggests that while LLM-generated profiles offer semantic depth and temporal structure, their effectiveness for context-aware recommendations is notably contingent on the richness of user interaction histories. Significant gains are observed in dense domains (e.g., Movies&TV), whereas improvements are less pronounced in sparse environments (e.g., Video Games). This work highlights LLMs' nuanced potential in enhancing user profiling for adaptive, context-aware recommendations, emphasizing the critical role of dataset characteristics for practical applicability.
title Using LLMs to Capture Users' Temporal Context for Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08512