Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2023

Abstract

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to interactively acquire user preferences and accordingly recommend items to users. Accurately learning the dynamic user preferences is of crucial importance for CRS. Previous works learn the user preferences with pairwise relations from the interactive conversation and item knowledge, while largely ignoring the fact that factors for a relationship in CRS are multiplex. Specifically, the user likes/dislikes the items that satisfy some attributes (Like/Dislike view). Moreover social influence is another important factor that affects user preference towards the item (Social view), while is largely ignored by previous works in CRS. The user preferences from these three views are inherently different but also correlated as a whole. The user preferences from the same views should be more similar than that from different views. The user preferences from Like View should be similar to Social View while different from Dislike View. To this end, we propose a novel model, namely Multi-view Hypergraph Contrastive Policy Learning (MHCPL). Specifically, MHCPL timely chooses useful social information according to the interactive history and builds a dynamic hypergraph with three types of multiplex relations from different views. The multiplex relations in each view are successively connected according to their generation order in the interactive conversation. A hierarchical hypergraph neural network is proposed to learn user preferences by integrating information of the graphical and sequential structure from the dynamic hypergraph. A cross-view contrastive learning module is proposed to maintain the inherent characteristics and the correlations of user preferences from different views. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MHCPL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords

Conversational recommendation, Reinforcement learning, Graph representation learning

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Taiwan, July 23-27

First Page

654

Last Page

664

ISBN

9781450394086

Identifier

10.1145/3539618.3591737

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York, USA

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