TREA: Tree-Structure Reasoning Schema for Conversational Recommendation
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing conversational recommendations for users by better modeling dynamic interests, though it is incremental as it builds on existing reasoning-based models with a more flexible structure.
The paper tackles the problem of conversational recommender systems (CRS) not fully capturing complex relationships in dialogues due to simplified reasoning structures, and proposes TREA, a tree-structure reasoning schema that improves response generation and recommendation accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art results on two public datasets.
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to timely trace the dynamic interests of users through dialogues and generate relevant responses for item recommendations. Recently, various external knowledge bases (especially knowledge graphs) are incorporated into CRS to enhance the understanding of conversation contexts. However, recent reasoning-based models heavily rely on simplified structures such as linear structures or fixed-hierarchical structures for causality reasoning, hence they cannot fully figure out sophisticated relationships among utterances with external knowledge. To address this, we propose a novel Tree structure Reasoning schEmA named TREA. TREA constructs a multi-hierarchical scalable tree as the reasoning structure to clarify the causal relationships between mentioned entities, and fully utilizes historical conversations to generate more reasonable and suitable responses for recommended results. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.