RevCore: Review-Augmented Conversational Recommendation

Existing conversational recommendation (CR) systems usually suffer from insufficient item information when conducted on short dialogue history and unfamiliar items.Incorporating external information (e.g., reviews) is a potential solution to alleviate this problem.Given that reviews often provide a rich and detailed user experience on different interests, they are potential ideal resources for providing high-quality recommendations within an informative conversation.In this paper, we design a novel end-to-end framework, namely, Review-augmented Conversational Recommender (RevCore), where reviews are seamlessly incorporated to enrich item information and assist in generating both coherent and informative responses.In detail, we extract sentiment-consistent reviews, perform review-enriched and entity-based recommendations for item suggestions, as well as use a review-attentive encoder-decoder for response generation.Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in yielding better performance on both recommendation and conversation responding. 1 The Heat Bad Boys