User-Centric Conversational Recommendation: Adapting the Need of User with Large Language Models

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) promise to provide a more natural user experience for exploring and discovering items of interest through ongoing conversation. However, effectively modeling and adapting to users' complex and changing preferences remains challenging. This research develops user-centric methods that focus on understanding and adapting to users throughout conversations to provide the most helpful recommendations. First, a graph-based Conversational Path Reasoning (CPR) framework is proposed that represents dialogs as interactive reasoning over a knowledge graph to capture nuanced user interests and explain recommendations. To further enhance relationship modeling, graph neural networks are incorporated for improved representation learning. Next, to address uncertainty in user needs, the Vague Preference Multi-round Conversational Recommendation (VPMCR) scenario and matching Adaptive Vague Preference Policy Learning (AVPPL) solution are presented using reinforcement learning to tailor recommendations to evolving preferences. Finally, opportunities to leverage large language models are discussed to further advance user experiences via advanced user modeling, policy learning, and response generation. Overall, this research focuses on designing conversational recommender systems that continuously understand and adapt to users' ambiguous, complex and changing needs during natural conversations.