English

Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems: A Landscape of Research

Information Retrieval 2022-10-31 v2 Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

Conversational recommender systems aim to interactively support online users in their information search and decision-making processes in an intuitive way. With the latest advances in voice-controlled devices, natural language processing, and AI in general, such systems received increased attention in recent years. Technically, conversational recommenders are usually complex multi-component applications and often consist of multiple machine learning models and a natural language user interface. Evaluating such a complex system in a holistic way can therefore be challenging, as it requires (i) the assessment of the quality of the different learning components, and (ii) the quality perception of the system as a whole by users. Thus, a mixed methods approach is often required, which may combine objective (computational) and subjective (perception-oriented) evaluation techniques. In this paper, we review common evaluation approaches for conversational recommender systems, identify possible limitations, and outline future directions towards more holistic evaluation practices.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.12061,
  title  = {Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems: A Landscape of Research},
  author = {Dietmar Jannach},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.12061},
  year   = {2022}
}