# A Conversation is Worth A Thousand Recommendations: A Survey of Holistic Conversational Recommender Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07682 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07682/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [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)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [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)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13366/) (2022)
- [Check Your Facts and Try Again: Improving Large Language Models with External Knowledge and Automated Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12813/) (2023)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [Text Is All You Need: Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13731/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00646/) (2020)
- [Recent Advances in Deep Learning Based Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04387/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Conversational Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10053/) (2023)
- [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 Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03954/) (2020)
- [Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07149/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Towards Unified Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge-Enhanced Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09363/) (2022)
- [Generative Recommendation: Towards Next-generation Recommender Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03516/) (2023)
- [HittER: Hierarchical Transformers for Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12813/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems via User Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08732/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Concept -- An Evaluation Protocol on Conversational Recommender Systems with System-centric and User-centric Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03304/) (2024)
- [Incorporating External Knowledge and Goal Guidance for LLM-based Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01868/) (2024)
- [Interplay: Training Independent Simulators for Reference-Free Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18573/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) generate recommendations through an interactive process. However, not all CRS approaches use human conversations as their source of interaction data; the majority of prior CRS work simulates interactions by exchanging entity-level information. As a result, claims of prior CRS work do not generalise to real-world settings where conversations take unexpected turns, or where conversational and intent understanding is not perfect. To tackle this challenge, the research community has started to examine holistic CRS, which are trained using conversational data collected from real-world scenarios. Despite their emergence, such holistic approaches are under-explored. We present a comprehensive survey of holistic CRS methods by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. Our survey recognises holistic CRS approaches as having three components: 1) a backbone language model, the optional use of 2) external knowledge, and/or 3) external guidance. We also give a detailed analysis of CRS datasets and evaluation methods in real application scenarios. We offer our insight as to the current challenges of holistic CRS and possible future trends.