{"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/parameter-efficient-conversational","title":"Parameter-Efficient Conversational Recommender System as a Language Processing Task","arxiv_id":"2401.14194","date":"2024-01-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mathieu Ravaut","Hao Zhang","Lu Xu","Aixin Sun","Yong liu"],"abstract":"Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend relevant items to users by eliciting user preference through natural language conversation. Prior work often utilizes external knowledge graphs for items' semantic information, a language model for dialogue generation, and a recommendation module for ranking relevant items. This combination of multiple components suffers from a cumbersome training process, and leads to semantic misalignment issues between dialogue generation and item recommendation. In this paper, we represent items in natural language and formulate CRS as a natural language processing task. Accordingly, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models to encode items, understand user intent via conversation, perform item recommendation through semantic matching, and generate dialogues. As a unified model, our PECRS (Parameter-Efficient CRS), can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. Experiments on two benchmark CRS datasets, ReDial and INSPIRED, demonstrate the effectiveness of PECRS on recommendation and conversation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ravoxsg/efficient_unified_crs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14194v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.14194v3.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":"parameter-efficient-conversational","repo_url":"https://github.com/ravoxsg/efficient_unified_crs","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"dialogue-generation","task_name":"Dialogue Generation"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-graphs","task_name":"Knowledge Graphs"},{"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":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2401.14194","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}