# Knowledge Graphs and Pre-trained Language Models enhanced Representation Learning for Conversational Recommender Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.10967 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10967/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Embedding Entities and Relations for Learning and Inference in Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6575/) (2014)
- [RotatE: Knowledge Graph Embedding by Relational Rotation in Complex Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10197/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning on Graphs with Jumping Knowledge Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03536/) (2018)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Graphs: Representation, Acquisition and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00388/) (2020)
- [KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06136/) (2019)
- [A Structured Self-attentive Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03130/) (2017)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.04808/) (2015)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [A Hierarchical Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Generating Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06069/) (2016)
- [DKN: Deep Knowledge-Aware Network for News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08284/) (2018)
- [Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge Graph based Semantic Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04032/) (2020)
- [Well-Read Students Learn Better: On the Importance of Pre-training Compact Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08962/) (2019)
- [Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03277/) (2018)
- [Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05391/) (2019)
- [Estimation-Action-Reflection: Towards Deep Interaction Between Conversational and Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09102/) (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)
- [JAKET: Joint Pre-training of Knowledge Graph and Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00796/) (2020)
- [Interactive Path Reasoning on Graph for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00194/) (2020)
- [Logic Attention Based Neighborhood Aggregation for Inductive Knowledge Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01399/) (2018)
- [RevCore: Review-augmented Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00957/) (2021)
- [Interactive Recommender System via Knowledge Graph-enhanced Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10389/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Graph Retrieval-Augmented LLM for Conversational Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06430/) (2025)
- [Reasoning over User Preferences: Knowledge Graph-Augmented LLMs for Explainable Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14459/) (2024)
- [Multi-Type Context-Aware Conversational Recommender Systems via Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13655/) (2025)
- [Conv4Rec: A 1-by-1 Convolutional AutoEncoder for User Profiling through Joint Analysis of Implicit and Explicit Feedbacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07499/) (2025)
- [Compositional Chain-of-Relations for Faithful Knowledge Graph Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22762/) (2026)
- [Graph-Based Personalized Memory for LLM Agents: Representation, Evolution, Retrieval, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08599/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) utilize natural language interactions and dialogue history to infer user preferences and provide accurate recommendations. Due to the limited conversation context and background knowledge, existing CRSs rely on external sources such as knowledge graphs to enrich the context and model entities based on their inter-relations. However, these methods ignore the rich intrinsic information within entities. To address this, we introduce the Knowledge-Enhanced Entity Representation Learning (KERL) framework, which leverages both the knowledge graph and a pre-trained language model to improve the semantic understanding of entities for CRS. In our KERL framework, entity textual descriptions are encoded via a pre-trained language model, while a knowledge graph helps reinforce the representation of these entities. We also employ positional encoding to effectively capture the temporal information of entities in a conversation. The enhanced entity representation is then used to develop a recommender component that fuses both entity and contextual representations for more informed recommendations, as well as a dialogue component that generates informative entity-related information in the response text. A high-quality knowledge graph with aligned entity descriptions is constructed to facilitate our study, namely the Wiki Movie Knowledge Graph (WikiMKG). The experimental results show that KERL achieves state-of-the-art results in both recommendation and response generation tasks.