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Stakeholders' conversations in requirements elicitation meetings hold valuable insights into system and client needs. However, manually extracting requirements is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to errors and biases. While…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Gianmario Voria , Francesco Casillo , Carmine Gravino , Gemma Catolino , Fabio Palomba

User simulation is a promising approach for automatically training and evaluating conversational information access agents, enabling the generation of synthetic dialogues and facilitating reproducible experiments at scale. However, the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-28 Nolwenn Bernard , Krisztian Balog

Conversational Product Search ( CPS ) systems interact with users via natural language to offer personalized and context-aware product lists. However, most existing research on CPS is limited to simulated conversations, due to the lack of a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Jie Zou , Mohammad Aliannejadi , Evangelos Kanoulas , Shuxi Han , Heli Ma , Zheng Wang , Yang Yang , Heng Tao Shen

Modelling persuasion strategies as predictors of task outcome has several real-world applications and has received considerable attention from the computational linguistics community. However, previous research has failed to account for the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-27 Ritam Dutt , Sayan Sinha , Rishabh Joshi , Surya Shekhar Chakraborty , Meredith Riggs , Xinru Yan , Haogang Bao , Carolyn Penstein Rosé

Conversational recommendation system (CRS) is able to obtain fine-grained and dynamic user preferences based on interactive dialogue. Previous CRS assumes that the user has a clear target item. However, for many users who resort to CRS,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Yiming Zhang , Lingfei Wu , Qi Shen , Yitong Pang , Zhihua Wei , Fangli Xu , Bo Long , Jian Pei

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in dialogue generation and reasoning, yet their effectiveness in eliciting user-known but concealed information in open-ended conversations remains limited. In many interactive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Tao Wang , Jingyao Lu , Xibo Wang , Haonan Huang , Su Yao , Zhiqiang Hu , Xingyan Chen , Enmao Diao

Nowadays, recommendation systems have become crucial to online platforms, shaping user exposure by accurate preference modeling. However, such an exposure strategy can also reinforce users' existing preferences, leading to a notorious…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Difu Feng , Qianqian Xu , Zitai Wang , Cong Hua , Zhiyong Yang , Qingming Huang

Preference elicitation explicitly asks users what kind of recommendations they would like to receive. It is a popular technique for conversational recommender systems to deal with cold-starts. Previous work has studied selection bias in…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Shashank Gupta , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Evaluation is crucial in the development process of task-oriented dialogue systems. As an evaluation method, user simulation allows us to tackle issues such as scalability and cost-efficiency, making it a viable choice for large-scale…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Weiwei Sun , Shuo Zhang , Krisztian Balog , Zhaochun Ren , Pengjie Ren , Zhumin Chen , Maarten de Rijke

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction on cold users is a challenging task in recommender systems. Recent researches have resorted to meta-learning to tackle the cold-user challenge, which either perform few-shot user representation learning…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Yanyan Shen , Lifan Zhao , Weiyu Cheng , Zibin Zhang , Wenwen Zhou , Kangyi Lin

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as reasoning modules in many applications. While they are efficient in certain tasks, LLMs often struggle to produce human-aligned solutions. Human-aligned decision making requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Alina Hyk , Sandhya Saisubramanian

Information-seeking conversation systems are increasingly popular in real-world applications, especially for e-commerce companies. To retrieve appropriate responses for users, it is necessary to compute the matching degrees between…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Haojie Pan , Cen Chen , Chengyu Wang , Minghui Qiu , Liu Yang , Feng Ji , Jun Huang

Open-domain human-computer conversation has been attracting increasing attention over the past few years. However, there does not exist a standard automatic evaluation metric for open-domain dialog systems; researchers usually resort to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-07-18 Chongyang Tao , Lili Mou , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

Much of the complexity of Recommender Systems (RSs) comes from the fact that they are used as part of more complex applications and affect user experience through a varied range of user interfaces. However, research focused almost…

Understanding what users like is relatively straightforward; understanding what users dislike, however, remains a challenging and underexplored problem. Research into users' negative preferences has gained increasing importance in modern…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Xinda Chen , Jiawei Wu , Yishuang Liu , Jialin Zhu , Shuwen Xiao , Junjun Zheng , Xiangheng Kong , Yuning Jiang

The growing popularity of language models has sparked interest in conversational recommender systems (CRS) within both industry and research circles. However, concerns regarding biases in these systems have emerged. While individual…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Armin Moradi , Golnoosh Farnadi

Recent advancements in language models and pre-trained language models like BERT and RoBERTa have revolutionized natural language processing, enabling a deeper understanding of human-like language. In this paper, we explore enhancing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Ngoc Luyen Le , Marie-Hélène Abel

Recommender Systems (RecSys) have become indispensable in numerous applications, profoundly influencing our everyday experiences. Despite their practical significance, academic research in RecSys often abstracts the formulation of research…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Aixin Sun

Recently, conversational recommender system (CRS) has become an emerging and practical research topic. Most of the existing CRS methods focus on learning effective preference representations for users from conversation data alone. While, we…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Hui Wang , Sirui Wang , Fuzheng Zhang , Zhongyuan Wang , Ji-Rong Wen

Sequential recommenders have been widely used in industry due to their strength in modeling user preferences. While these models excel at learning a user's positive interests, less attention has been paid to learning from negative user…