# A Survey on Conversational Recommender Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 143 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 143)

- [Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13366/) (2022)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05817/) (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)
- [Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01157/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Competitive Near Cold-start Recommenders for Language- and Item-based Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14225/) (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)
- [A Multi-Agent Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01135/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Model Empowered Agents for Recommendation and Search: Towards Next-Generation Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05659/) (2025)
- [A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06923/) (2022)
- [User-Centric Conversational Recommendation with Multi-Aspect User Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09263/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models as Recommender Systems: A Study of Popularity Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01285/) (2024)
- [Is Conversational XAI All You Need? Human-AI Decision Making With a Conversational XAI Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17546/) (2025)
- [Unleashing the Power of Continual Learning on Non-Centralized Devices: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13840/) (2024)
- [ChoiceMates: Supporting Unfamiliar Online Decision-Making with Multi-Agent Conversational Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01331/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15576/) (2024)
- [MuseChat: A Conversational Music Recommendation System for Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06282/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Conversational Recommendation with Prompt-based Semi-Structured Natural Language State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00033/) (2024)
- [Are Generative AI Agents Effective Personalized Financial Advisors?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05862/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Foundation Model-Powered Recommender Systems: From Feature-Based, Generative to Agentic Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16420/) (2025)
- [Conversational Recommender System and Large Language Model Are Made for Each Other in E-commerce Pre-sales Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14626/) (2023)
- [KECRS: Towards Knowledge-Enriched Conversational Recommendation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08261/) (2021)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Recommender (AGR): Early Experiments with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04518/) (2023)
- [Generative Echo Chamber? Effects of LLM-Powered Search Systems on Diverse Information Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05880/) (2024)
- [U-NEED: A Fine-grained Dataset for User Needs-Centric E-commerce Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04774/) (2023)
- [RecUserSim: A Realistic and Diverse User Simulator for Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22897/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recommender systems are software applications that help users to find items of interest in situations of information overload. Current research often assumes a one-shot interaction paradigm, where the users' preferences are estimated based on past observed behavior and where the presentation of a ranked list of suggestions is the main, one-directional form of user interaction. Conversational recommender systems (CRS) take a different approach and support a richer set of interactions. These interactions can, for example, help to improve the preference elicitation process or allow the user to ask questions about the recommendations and to give feedback. The interest in CRS has significantly increased in the past few years. This development is mainly due to the significant progress in the area of natural language processing, the emergence of new voice-controlled home assistants, and the increased use of chatbot technology. With this paper, we provide a detailed survey of existing approaches to conversational recommendation. We categorize these approaches in various dimensions, e.g., in terms of the supported user intents or the knowledge they use in the background. Moreover, we discuss technological approaches, review how CRS are evaluated, and finally identify a number of gaps that deserve more research in the future.