SynthTRIPs: A Knowledge-Grounded Framework for Benchmark Query Generation for Personalized Tourism Recommenders
This work addresses data scarcity for personalized tourism recommenders, particularly for sustainable and off-peak travel, though it is incremental as it applies existing LLM methods to a new domain with grounding techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of limited breadth and depth in publicly available travel datasets for Tourism Recommender Systems by introducing SynthTRIPs, a framework that uses LLMs grounded in a knowledge base to generate synthetic travel queries with diverse user personas and sustainability filters, with evaluations showing effectiveness in capturing underrepresented personalization aspects.
Tourism Recommender Systems (TRS) are crucial in personalizing travel experiences by tailoring recommendations to users' preferences, constraints, and contextual factors. However, publicly available travel datasets often lack sufficient breadth and depth, limiting their ability to support advanced personalization strategies -- particularly for sustainable travel and off-peak tourism. In this work, we explore using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic travel queries that emulate diverse user personas and incorporate structured filters such as budget constraints and sustainability preferences. This paper introduces a novel SynthTRIPs framework for generating synthetic travel queries using LLMs grounded in a curated knowledge base (KB). Our approach combines persona-based preferences (e.g., budget, travel style) with explicit sustainability filters (e.g., walkability, air quality) to produce realistic and diverse queries. We mitigate hallucination and ensure factual correctness by grounding the LLM responses in the KB. We formalize the query generation process and introduce evaluation metrics for assessing realism and alignment. Both human expert evaluations and automatic LLM-based assessments demonstrate the effectiveness of our synthetic dataset in capturing complex personalization aspects underrepresented in existing datasets. While our framework was developed and tested for personalized city trip recommendations, the methodology applies to other recommender system domains. Code and dataset are made public at https://bit.ly/synthTRIPs