# Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.07617 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/

## Key facts

- Cited by 176 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 176)

- [Evaluating Memory in LLM Agents via Incremental Multi-Turn Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05257/) (2025)
- [How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05817/) (2023)
- [Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16505/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Conversational Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10053/) (2023)
- [Advances and Challenges in Conversational Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09459/) (2021)
- [When Large Language Models Meet Personalization: Perspectives of Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16376/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge-Enhanced Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09363/) (2022)
- [Personalized Prompt Learning for Explainable Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07371/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02750/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07961/) (2023)
- [A Review of Modern Recommender Systems Using Generative Models (Gen-RecSys)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00579/) (2024)
- [A Survey on LLM-powered Agents for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10050/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Evaluation for Conversational Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13112/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models as Generative User Simulators for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09738/) (2024)
- [RevCore: Review-augmented Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00957/) (2021)
- [DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08877/) (2021)
- [Neural Approaches to Conversational Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05176/) (2022)
- [CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00939/) (2021)
- [Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07924/) (2021)
- [A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06923/) (2022)
- [Meet Your Favorite Character: Open-domain Chatbot Mimicking Fictional Characters with only a Few Utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10825/) (2022)
- [Knowledge Is Flat: A Seq2Seq Generative Framework for Various Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07299/) (2022)
- [A Large Language Model Enhanced Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06212/) (2023)
- [User-Centric Conversational Recommendation with Multi-Aspect User Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09263/) (2022)
- [How Reliable is Your Simulator? Analysis on the Limitations of Current LLM-based User Simulators for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16416/) (2024)
- [Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems' Quality with Context-Aware Item Meta Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08140/) (2021)
- [Learning Neural Templates for Recommender Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12302/) (2021)
- [Variational Reasoning over Incomplete Knowledge Graphs for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11868/) (2022)
- [DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10172/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15576/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendation is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as the associated discourse involves goal-driven dialogue that often transforms naturally into more free-form chat. This paper provides two contributions. First, until now there has been no publicly available large-scale dataset consisting of real-world dialogues centered around recommendations. To address this issue and to facilitate our exploration here, we have collected ReDial, a dataset consisting of over 10,000 conversations centered around the theme of providing movie recommendations. We make this data available to the community for further research. Second, we use this dataset to explore multiple facets of conversational recommendations. In particular we explore new neural architectures, mechanisms, and methods suitable for composing conversational recommendation systems. Our dataset allows us to systematically probe model sub-components addressing different parts of the overall problem domain ranging from: sentiment analysis and cold-start recommendation generation to detailed aspects of how natural language is used in this setting in the real world. We combine such sub-components into a full-blown dialogue system and examine its behavior.