This is the site for the SIGIR 2020 tutorial on Conversational Recommendation: Formulation, Methods, and Evaluation.
About the tutorial
Recommender systems have demonstrated great success in information seeking. However, traditional recommender systems work in a static way, estimating user preferences on items from past interaction history. This prevents recommender systems from capturing dynamic and fine-grained preferences of users. Conversational recommender systems bring a revolution to existing recommender systems. They are able to communicate with users through natural languages during which they can explicitly ask whether a user likes an attribute or not. With the preferred attributes, a recommender system can conduct more accurate and personalized recommendations.
Therefore, while they are still a relatively new topic, conversational recommender systems attract great research attention. We identify four emerging directions: (1) exploration and exploitation trade-off in the cold-start recommendation setting; (2) attribute-centric conversational recommendation; (3) strategy-focused conversational recommendation; and (4) dialogue understanding and response generation. This tutorial covers these four directions, providing a review of existing approaches and progress on the topic.
By presenting the emerging and promising topic of conversational recommender systems, we aim to provide take-aways to practitioners to build their own systems. We also want to stimulate more ideas and discussions with audiences on core problems of this topic such as task formalization, dataset collection, algorithm development, and evaluation, with the ambition of facilitating the development of conversational recommender systems.
Schedule
The SIGIR 2020 tutorials will be presented on July 26, 2020. Further details about the time zone and schedule are still to be confirmed.
| Time slot | Topics | Presenter | Material |
|---|---|---|---|
| First time slot | First topic | First presenter | First chunk of slides |
| Second time slot | Second topic | Second presenter | Second chunk of slides |
Materials
Material made available for download will include
- Slides – All slides will be made publicly available.
- Annotated bibliography – An annotated compilation of references will list all works discussed in the tutorial and should provide a good basis for further study.
- Code – An annotated list of pointers to open source code and datasets for the work discussed in our tutorial will be shared with attendees of the tutorial.
- Survey – We are writing a survey on conversational recommendation; a complete draft will be shared with attendees of the tutorial.
Presenters
- Wenqiang Lei
- Xiangnan He
- Maarten de Rijke
- Tat-Seng Chua
Citation
If you’d like to refer to the tutorial in your publications, please use the following:
@inproceedings{lei-2020-conversational,
Author = {Lei, Wenqiang and He, Xiangnan and de Rijke, Maarten and Chua, Tat-Seng},
Booktitle = {SIGIR 2020: 43rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval},
Month = {July},
Publisher = {ACM},
Title = {Conversational Recommendation: Formulation, Methods, and Evaluation},
Year = {2020}}