# Improving Conversational Recommender System via Contextual and Time-Aware Modeling with Less Domain-Specific Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11386 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11386/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02424/) (2016)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06554/) (2019)
- [Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge Graph based Semantic Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04032/) (2020)
- [Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03277/) (2018)
- [Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05391/) (2019)
- [Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03954/) (2020)
- [Estimation-Action-Reflection: Towards Deep Interaction Between Conversational and Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09102/) (2020)
- [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)
- [PLATO-2: Towards Building an Open-Domain Chatbot via Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16779/) (2020)
- [Interactive Path Reasoning on Graph for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00194/) (2020)
- [A Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder For Generative Context-Aware Query Suggestion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.02221/) (2015)
- [Unified Conversational Recommendation Policy Learning via Graph-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09710/) (2021)
- [Empirical Analysis of Predictive Algorithms for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.7363/) (2013)
- [RevCore: Review-augmented Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00957/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Reinforced Strategy Optimization for Conversational Recommender Systems via Network-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26093/) (2025)
- [A Conversation is Worth A Thousand Recommendations: A Survey of Holistic Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07682/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) has become an emerging research topic seeking to perform recommendations through interactive conversations, which generally consist of generation and recommendation modules. Prior work on CRS tends to incorporate more external and domain-specific knowledge like item reviews to enhance performance. Despite the fact that the collection and annotation of the external domain-specific information needs much human effort and degenerates the generalizability, too much extra knowledge introduces more difficulty to balance among them. Therefore, we propose to fully discover and extract internal knowledge from the context. We capture both entity-level and contextual-level representations to jointly model user preferences for the recommendation, where a time-aware attention is designed to emphasize the recently appeared items in entity-level representations. We further use the pre-trained BART to initialize the generation module to alleviate the data scarcity and enhance the context modeling. In addition to conducting experiments on a popular dataset (ReDial), we also include a multi-domain dataset (OpenDialKG) to show the effectiveness of our model. Experiments on both datasets show that our model achieves better performance on most evaluation metrics with less external knowledge and generalizes well to other domains. Additional analyses on the recommendation and generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in different scenarios.