Conversational Product Recommendation using LLM

It is expected to deploy chatbots as sales assistants on e-commerce platforms soon. In recent years, the capabilities demonstrated by large language models (LLMs) indicate their suitability for this role. However, a dialogue process is not fully established. Most existing works concentrate on searching for ideal products, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and product search. Many proposed methods rely on product reviews. However, in the case of some e-commerce platform products, valuable reviews are often lacking, rendering these approaches impractical. Thus, we studied how to assist users and select a set of candidate products. Accordingly, we simulated sales conversations based on the product features provided by the seller, using LLM and reliable content while addressing the cold-start problem. Specifically, we used product features to generate customer persona for user simulation. LLM was used to play the role of sales assistant in giving recommendations. The experimental results showed that practical conversation was created between customers and chatbots in Traditional Chinese. The code and results are available at: https://github.com/terryobe-ncu/CPR_LLM