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Q&R: A Two-Stage Approach toward Interactive Recommendation

Published: 19 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Recommendation systems, prevalent in many applications, aim to surface to users the right content at the right time. Recently, researchers have aspired to develop conversational systems that offer seamless interactions with users, more effectively eliciting user preferences and offering better recommendations. Taking a step towards this goal, this paper explores the two stages of a single round of conversation with a user: which question to ask the user, and how to use their feedback to respond with a more accurate recommendation. Following these two stages, first, we detail an RNN-based model for generating topics a user might be interested in, and then extend a state-of-the-art RNN-based video recommender to incorporate the user's selected topic. We describe our proposed system Q&R, i.e., Question & Recommendation, and the surrogate tasks we utilize to bootstrap data for training our models. We evaluate different components of Q&R on live traffic in various applications within YouTube: User Onboarding, Homepage Recommendation, and Notifications. Our results demonstrate that our approach improves upon state-of-the-art recommendation models, including RNNs, and makes these applications more useful, such as a >1% increase in video notifications opened. Further, our design choices can be useful to practitioners wanting to transition to more conversational recommendation systems.

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MP4 File (beutel_interactive_recommendation.mp4)

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Published In

KDD '18: Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining
July 2018
2925 pages
ISBN:9781450355520
DOI:10.1145/3219819
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 19 July 2018

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Author Tags

  1. bootstrapping conversations
  2. engaging casual users
  3. interactive recommendation
  4. question and recommendation

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KDD '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 983 submissions, 11%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,133 of 8,635 submissions, 13%

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  • (2024)Toward Faceted Skill Recommendation in Intelligent Personal AssistantsProceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3640543.3645201(640-649)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
  • (2024)A Tutorial-Generating Method for Autonomous Online LearningIEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies10.1109/TLT.2024.339059317(1558-1567)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Online Learning and Detecting Corrupted Users for Conversational Recommendation SystemsIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2024.344825036:12(8939-8953)Online publication date: Dec-2024
  • (2024)Conversational Recommendation With Online Learning and Clustering on Misspecified UsersIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2024.342344236:12(7825-7838)Online publication date: Dec-2024
  • (2024)Improving Conversational Recommender System Via Contextual and Time-Aware Modeling With Less Domain-Specific KnowledgeIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2024.339732136:11(6447-6461)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Counterfactual Explainable Conversational RecommendationIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2023.332240336:6(2388-2400)Online publication date: Jun-2024
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  • (2023)Lending interaction wings to recommender systems with conversational agentsProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems10.5555/3666122.3667335(27951-27979)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2023
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