# INSPIRED2: An Improved Dataset for Sociable Conversational Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04104 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04104/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00646/) (2020)
- [MultiVerS: Improving scientific claim verification with weak supervision and full-document context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01640/) (2021)
- [Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge Graph based Semantic Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04032/) (2020)
- [Advances and Challenges in Conversational Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09459/) (2021)
- [Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05391/) (2019)
- [Towards Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04125/) (2020)
- [INSPIRED: Toward Sociable Recommendation Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14306/) (2020)
- [Unifying Knowledge Graph Learning and Recommendation: Towards a Better Understanding of User Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06236/) (2019)
- [Recommendation as a Communication Game: Self-Supervised Bot-Play for Goal-oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03922/) (2019)
- [Learning to Ask Appropriate Questions in Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04774/) (2021)
- [CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00939/) (2021)
- [Towards Knowledge-Based Personalized Product Description Generation in E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12457/) (2019)
- [Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07924/) (2021)
- [C2-CRS: Coarse-to-Fine Contrastive Learning for Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02732/) (2022)
- [KECRS: Towards Knowledge-Enriched Conversational Recommendation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08261/) (2021)
- [Semi-Automatic Data Annotation guided by Feature Space Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13689/) (2020)
- [Improving Conversational Recommendation System by Pretraining on Billions Scale of Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14899/) (2021)
- [Conversational Recommendation: A Grand AI Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09126/) (2022)
- [Towards Retrieval-based Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02311/) (2021)
- [COOKIE: A Dataset for Conversational Recommendation over Knowledge Graphs in E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09237/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Injecting Salesperson's Dialogue Strategies in Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18564/) (2024)
- [SalesBot 2.0: A Human-Like Intent-Guided Chit-Chat Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14266/) (2023)
- [A Conversation is Worth A Thousand Recommendations: A Survey of Holistic Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07682/) (2023)
- [Evaluation on Entity Matching in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17218/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) that are able to interact with users in natural language often utilize recommendation dialogs which were previously collected with the help of paired humans, where one plays the role of a seeker and the other as a recommender. These recommendation dialogs include items and entities that indicate the users' preferences. In order to precisely model the seekers' preferences and respond consistently, CRS typically rely on item and entity annotations. A recent example of such a dataset is INSPIRED, which consists of recommendation dialogs for sociable conversational recommendation, where items and entities were annotated using automatic keyword or pattern matching techniques. An analysis of this dataset unfortunately revealed that there is a substantial number of cases where items and entities were either wrongly annotated or annotations were missing at all. This leads to the question to what extent automatic techniques for annotations are effective. Moreover, it is important to study impact of annotation quality on the overall effectiveness of a CRS in terms of the quality of the system's responses. To study these aspects, we manually fixed the annotations in INSPIRED. We then evaluated the performance of several benchmark CRS using both versions of the dataset. Our analyses suggest that the improved version of the dataset, i.e., INSPIRED2, helped increase the performance of several benchmark CRS, emphasizing the importance of data quality both for end-to-end learning and retrieval-based approaches to conversational recommendation. We release our improved dataset (INSPIRED2) publicly at https://github.com/ahtsham58/INSPIRED2.