# Towards Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.04125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04125/

## Key facts

- Cited by 94 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 94)

- [How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05817/) (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)
- [Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13626/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge-Enhanced Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09363/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07961/) (2023)
- [DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08877/) (2021)
- [A Multi-Agent Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01135/) (2024)
- [CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00939/) (2021)
- [Rec-R1: Bridging Generative Large Language Models and User-Centric Recommendation Systems via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24289/) (2025)
- [A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06923/) (2022)
- [A Large Language Model Enhanced Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06212/) (2023)
- [XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04457/) (2022)
- [User-Centric Conversational Recommendation with Multi-Aspect User Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09263/) (2022)
- [C2-CRS: Coarse-to-Fine Contrastive Learning for Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02732/) (2022)
- [Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07397/) (2023)
- [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)
- [A Survey of Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15576/) (2024)
- [SalesBot: Transitioning from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10591/) (2022)
- [Pearl: A Review-driven Persona-Knowledge Grounded Conversational Recommendation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04460/) (2024)
- [TREA: Tree-Structure Reasoning Schema for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10543/) (2023)
- [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)
- [RecInDial: A Unified Framework for Conversational Recommendation with Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07477/) (2021)
- [U-NEED: A Fine-grained Dataset for User Needs-Centric E-commerce Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04774/) (2023)
- [Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems via Bias Analysis and Language-Model-Enhanced Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16738/) (2023)
- [Behavior Alignment: A New Perspective of Evaluating LLM-based Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11773/) (2024)
- [The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14195/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Conversational Preference Elicitation with Bandit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06129/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. To develop an effective CRS, the support of high-quality datasets is essential. Existing CRS datasets mainly focus on immediate requests from users, while lack proactive guidance to the recommendation scenario. In this paper, we contribute a new CRS dataset named TG-ReDial (Recommendation through Topic-Guided Dialog). Our dataset has two major features. First, it incorporates topic threads to enforce natural semantic transitions towards the recommendation scenario. Second, it is created in a semi-automatic way, hence human annotation is more reasonable and controllable. Based on TG-ReDial, we present the task of topic-guided conversational recommendation, and propose an effective approach to this task. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach on three sub-tasks, namely topic prediction, item recommendation and response generation. TG-ReDial is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TG-ReDial.