{"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/it-doesnt-look-good-for-a-date-transforming","title":"“It doesn’t look good for a date”: Transforming Critiques into Preferences for Conversational Recommendation Systems","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-11-01","proceeding":"EMNLP 2021 11","authors":["Victor Bursztyn","Jennifer Healey","Nedim Lipka","Eunyee Koh","Doug Downey","Larry Birnbaum"],"abstract":"Conversations aimed at determining good recommendations are iterative in nature. People often express their preferences in terms of a critique of the current recommendation (e.g., “It doesn’t look good for a date”), requiring some degree of common sense for a preference to be inferred. In this work, we present a method for transforming a user critique into a positive preference (e.g., “I prefer more romantic”) in order to retrieve reviews pertaining to potentially better recommendations (e.g., “Perfect for a romantic dinner”). We leverage a large neural language model (LM) in a few-shot setting to perform critique-to-preference transformation, and we test two methods for retrieving recommendations: one that matches embeddings, and another that fine-tunes an LM for the task. We instantiate this approach in the restaurant domain and evaluate it using a new dataset of restaurant critiques. In an ablation study, we show that utilizing critique-to-preference transformation improves recommendations, and that there are at least three general cases that explain this improved performance.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.145","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.145.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":"it-doesnt-look-good-for-a-date-transforming","repo_url":"https://github.com/vbursztyn/critique-to-preference-emnlp2021","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"common-sense-reasoning","task_name":"Common Sense Reasoning"},{"task_slug":"conversational-recommendation","task_name":"Conversational Recommendation"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}