{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/identifying-breakdowns-in-conversational","title":"Identifying Breakdowns in Conversational Recommender Systems using User Simulation","arxiv_id":"2405.14249","date":"2024-05-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nolwenn Bernard","Krisztian Balog"],"abstract":"We present a methodology to systematically test conversational recommender systems with regards to conversational breakdowns. It involves examining conversations generated between the system and simulated users for a set of pre-defined breakdown types, extracting responsible conversational paths, and characterizing them in terms of the underlying dialogue intents. User simulation offers the advantages of simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and time efficiency for obtaining conversations where potential breakdowns can be identified. The proposed methodology can be used as diagnostic tool as well as a development tool to improve conversational recommendation systems. We apply our methodology in a case study with an existing conversational recommender system and user simulator, demonstrating that with just a few iterations, we can make the system more robust to conversational breakdowns.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14249v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.14249v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"identifying-breakdowns-in-conversational","repo_url":"https://github.com/nob0/crs-breakdown-detection","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"conversational-recommendation","task_name":"Conversational Recommendation"},{"task_slug":"diagnostic","task_name":"Diagnostic"},{"task_slug":"user-simulation","task_name":"User Simulation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}