# ChatGPT for Conversational Recommendation: Refining Recommendations by Reprompting with Feedback

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03605/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [Actionable Recourse in Linear Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06514/) (2018)
- [Chat-REC: Towards Interactive and Explainable LLMs-Augmented Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14524/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good Recommender? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10149/) (2023)
- [Do LLMs Understand User Preferences? Evaluating LLMs On User Rating Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06474/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Competitive Near Cold-start Recommenders for Language- and Item-based Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14225/) (2023)

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

- [Baichuan-M1: Pushing the Medical Capability of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12671/) (2025)
- [Towards Next-Generation LLM-based Recommender Systems: A Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19744/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Foundation Model-Powered Recommender Systems: From Feature-Based, Generative to Agentic Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16420/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Impact of Large Language Models on Recommender Systems: An Extensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18590/) (2024)
- [GestFormer: Multiscale Wavelet Pooling Transformer Network for Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11180/) (2024)
- [Multi-Type Context-Aware Conversational Recommender Systems via Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13655/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recommendation algorithms have been pivotal in handling the overwhelming volume of online content. However, these algorithms seldom consider direct user input, resulting in superficial interaction between them. Efforts have been made to include the user directly in the recommendation process through conversation, but these systems too have had limited interactivity. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have gained popularity due to their ease of use and their ability to adapt dynamically to various tasks while responding to feedback. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a top-n conversational recommendation system. We build a rigorous pipeline around ChatGPT to simulate how a user might realistically probe the model for recommendations: by first instructing and then reprompting with feedback to refine a set of recommendations. We further explore the effect of popularity bias in ChatGPT's recommendations, and compare its performance to baseline models. We find that reprompting ChatGPT with feedback is an effective strategy to improve recommendation relevancy, and that popularity bias can be mitigated through prompt engineering.