# AUGUST: an Automatic Generation Understudy for Synthesizing Conversational Recommendation Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09631 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09631/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Embedding Entities and Relations for Learning and Inference in Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6575/) (2014)
- [ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14373/) (2020)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00646/) (2020)
- [Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs with Graph Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02342/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Investigating Pretrained Language Models for Graph-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08426/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Neural data-to-text generation: A comparison between pipeline and end-to-end architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09022/) (2019)
- [RevCore: Review-augmented Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00957/) (2021)
- [CycleGT: Unsupervised Graph-to-Text and Text-to-Graph Generation via Cycle Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04702/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01623/) (2021)

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

- [A Conversation is Worth A Thousand Recommendations: A Survey of Holistic Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07682/) (2023)
- [Optimizing Recommendations using Fine-Tuned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06841/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-quality data is essential for conversational recommendation systems and serves as the cornerstone of the network architecture development and training strategy design. Existing works contribute heavy human efforts to manually labeling or designing and extending recommender dialogue templates. However, they suffer from (i) the limited number of human annotators results in that datasets can hardly capture rich and large-scale cases in the real world, (ii) the limited experience and knowledge of annotators account for the uninformative corpus and inappropriate recommendations. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic dataset synthesis approach that can generate both large-scale and high-quality recommendation dialogues through a data2text generation process, where unstructured recommendation conversations are generated from structured graphs based on user-item information from the real world. In doing so, we comprehensively exploit: (i) rich personalized user profiles from traditional recommendation datasets, (ii) rich external knowledge from knowledge graphs, and (iii) the conversation ability contained in human-to-human conversational recommendation datasets. Extensive experiments validate the benefit brought by the automatically synthesized data under low-resource scenarios and demonstrate the promising potential to facilitate the development of a more effective conversational recommendation system.