Wenxuan Zhang

Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Weiwen Xu et al.

Recent years witnessed several advances in developing multi-goal conversational recommender systems (MG-CRS) that can proactively attract users' interests and naturally lead user-engaged dialogues with multiple conversational goals and diverse topics. Four tasks are often involved in MG-CRS, including Goal Planning, Topic Prediction, Item Recommendation, and Response Generation. Most existing studies address only some of these tasks. To handle the whole problem of MG-CRS, modularized frameworks are adopted where each task is tackled independently without considering their interdependencies. In this work, we propose a novel Unified MultI-goal conversational recommeNDer system, namely UniMIND. In specific, we unify these four tasks with different formulations into the same sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) paradigm. Prompt-based learning strategies are investigated to endow the unified model with the capability of multi-task learning. Finally, the overall learning and inference procedure consists of three stages, including multi-task learning, prompt-based tuning, and inference. Experimental results on two MG-CRS benchmarks (DuRecDial and TG-ReDial) show that UniMIND achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tasks with a unified model. Extensive analyses and discussions are provided for shedding some new perspectives for MG-CRS.

Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Qian Yu et al.

Product question answering (PQA), aiming to automatically provide instant responses to customer's questions in E-Commerce platforms, has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Compared with typical QA problems, PQA exhibits unique challenges such as the subjectivity and reliability of user-generated contents in E-commerce platforms. Therefore, various problem settings and novel methods have been proposed to capture these special characteristics. In this paper, we aim to systematically review existing research efforts on PQA. Specifically, we categorize PQA studies into four problem settings in terms of the form of provided answers. We analyze the pros and cons, as well as present existing datasets and evaluation protocols for each setting. We further summarize the most significant challenges that characterize PQA from general QA applications and discuss their corresponding solutions. Finally, we conclude this paper by providing the prospect on several future directions.

Yang Deng, Yaliang Li, Wenxuan Zhang et al.

Recently, Product Question Answering (PQA) on E-Commerce platforms has attracted increasing attention as it can act as an intelligent online shopping assistant and improve the customer shopping experience. Its key function, automatic answer generation for product-related questions, has been studied by aiming to generate content-preserving while question-related answers. However, an important characteristic of PQA, i.e., personalization, is neglected by existing methods. It is insufficient to provide the same "completely summarized" answer to all customers, since many customers are more willing to see personalized answers with customized information only for themselves, by taking into consideration their own preferences towards product aspects or information needs. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel Personalized Answer GEneration method (PAGE) with multi-perspective preference modeling, which explores historical user-generated contents to model user preference for generating personalized answers in PQA. Specifically, we first retrieve question-related user history as external knowledge to model knowledge-level user preference. Then we leverage Gaussian Softmax distribution model to capture latent aspect-level user preference. Finally, we develop a persona-aware pointer network to generate personalized answers in terms of both content and style by utilizing personal user preference and dynamic user vocabulary. Experimental results on real-world E-Commerce QA datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods by generating informative and customized answers, and show that answer generation in E-Commerce can benefit from personalization.