Speaker: Xu Guandong, Professor, School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney

Date: September 2, 2023

Time: 15:00-16:00

Location: Room 513, District 3, Software Campus

Sponsor: Joint SDU-NTU Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research

Abstract:

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) fundamentally differ from traditional recommender systems by interacting with users in a conversational session to accurately predict their current preferences and provide personalized recommendations. Although current CRSs have achieved favorable recommendation performance, the explainability is still in its infancy stage. Most of the CRSs tend to provide coarse explanations and fail to explore the impact of minimal alterations on the recommendation decisions on items. In this talk, we propose to incorporate the counterfactual techniques into CRS and propose a Counterfactual Explainable Conversational Recommender (CECR) to enhance the recommendation model from a counterfactual perspective. Counterfactual explanations can offer fine-grained reasons to explain users' real-time intentions, meanwhile generating counterfactual samples for augmenting the training data set to enhance recommendation performance. Specifically, CECR adaptively learns users' preferences based on the conversation context and effectively responds to users' real-time feedback during multiple rounds of conversation. Empirical experiments carried out on three benchmark datasets show that our CECR outperforms state-of-the-art CRSs in terms of recommendation performance and explainability.

For more information, please visit:

https://www.view.sdu.edu.cn/info/1020/183174.htm