Papers › Towards Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender System

Towards Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender System

8 Oct 2020COLING 2020 8arXiv:2010.04125archive 2025-07-28

Kun Zhou, Yuanhang Zhou, Wayne Xin Zhao, Xiaoke Wang, Ji-Rong Wen

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. To develop an effective CRS, the support of high-quality datasets is essential. Existing CRS datasets mainly focus on immediate requests from users, while lack proactive guidance to the recommendation scenario. In this paper, we contribute a new CRS dataset named \textbf{TG-ReDial} (\textbf{Re}commendation through \textbf{T}opic-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{Dial}og). Our dataset has two major features. First, it incorporates topic threads to enforce natural semantic transitions towards the recommendation scenario. Second, it is created in a semi-automatic way, hence human annotation is more reasonable and controllable. Based on TG-ReDial, we present the task of topic-guided conversational recommendation, and propose an effective approach to this task. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach on three sub-tasks, namely topic prediction, item recommendation and response generation. TG-ReDial is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TG-ReDial.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

RUCAIBox/TG-ReDial officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report
rucaibox/tg_crs_code mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Conversational RecommendationRecommendation SystemsResponse Generation

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

TG-ReDial

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections