论文标题

重新思考对话建议:决策树是您所需要的吗?

Rethinking Conversational Recommendations: Is Decision Tree All You Need?

论文作者

Haque, A S M Ahsan-Ul, Wang, Hongning

论文摘要

会话推荐系统(CRS)通过多转化的问题和答案动态获得用户偏好。现有的CRS解决方案被深入的增强学习算法广泛主导。但是,经常因缺乏可解释性和需要大量培训数据而受到批评深厚的加强学习方法。 在本文中,我们探讨了一种更简单的替代方案,并向CRS提出了基于决策树的解决方案。 CRS中的基本挑战是,同一项目可以由不同的用户以不同的方式描述。我们表明,决策树足以表征用户与项目之间的相互作用,并解决多转变CRS中的关键挑战:即要问哪些问题,如何对候选项目进行排名,何时推荐以及如何处理建议的负面反馈。首先,对决策树的培训使我们能够找到有效缩小搜索空间的问题。其次,通过学习每个项目和树节点的嵌入,可以根据与树节点编码的对话上下文相似性对候选项目进行排名。第三,与每个树节点相关的项目的多样性使我们能够制定早期停止策略来决定何时提出建议。第四,当用户拒绝建议时,我们会自适应选择下一个决策树,以改善后续的问题和建议。对三个公开基准CRS数据集进行了广泛的实验表明,我们的方法可对最先进的CRS方法的状态有重大改进。

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) dynamically obtain the user preferences via multi-turn questions and answers. The existing CRS solutions are widely dominated by deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, deep reinforcement learning methods are often criticised for lacking interpretability and requiring a large amount of training data to perform. In this paper, we explore a simpler alternative and propose a decision tree based solution to CRS. The underlying challenge in CRS is that the same item can be described differently by different users. We show that decision trees are sufficient to characterize the interactions between users and items, and solve the key challenges in multi-turn CRS: namely which questions to ask, how to rank the candidate items, when to recommend, and how to handle negative feedback on the recommendations. Firstly, the training of decision trees enables us to find questions which effectively narrow down the search space. Secondly, by learning embeddings for each item and tree nodes, the candidate items can be ranked based on their similarity to the conversation context encoded by the tree nodes. Thirdly, the diversity of items associated with each tree node allows us to develop an early stopping strategy to decide when to make recommendations. Fourthly, when the user rejects a recommendation, we adaptively choose the next decision tree to improve subsequent questions and recommendations. Extensive experiments on three publicly available benchmark CRS datasets show that our approach provides significant improvement to the state of the art CRS methods.

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