CoreSense: Social Commonsense Knowledge-Aware Context Refinement for Conversational Recommender System

Unlike the traditional recommender systems that rely on historical data such as clicks or purchases, a conversational recommender system (CRS) aims to provide a personalized recommendation through a natural conversation. The conversational interaction facilitates capturing not only explicit preference from mentioned items but also implicit states, such as a user’s current situation and emotional states from a dialogue context. Nevertheless, existing CRSs fall short of fully exploiting a dialogue context since they primarily derive explicit user preferences from the items and item-attributes mentioned in a conversation. To address this limitation and attain a comprehensive understanding of a dialogue context, we propose CoreSense, a conversational recommender system enhanced with social commonsense knowledge. In other words, CoreSense exploits the social commonsense knowledge graph ATOMIC to capture the user’s implicit states, such as a user’s current situation and emotional states, from a dialogue context. Thus, the social commonsense knowledge-augmented CRS can provide a more appropriate recommendation from a given dialogue context. Furthermore, we enhance the collaborative filtering effect by utilizing the user’s states inferred from commonsense knowledge as an improved criterion for retrieving other dialogues of similar interests. Extensive experiments on CRS benchmark datasets show that CoreSense provides human-like recommendations and responses based on inferred user states, achieving significant performance improvements.