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Inf. Syst."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2020,10,31]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Recommender systems have been attracting much attention from both academia and industry because of their ability to capture user interests and generate personalized item recommendations. As the life pace in contemporary society speeds up, traditional recommender systems are inevitably limited by their disconnected interaction styles and low adaptivity to users\u2019 evolving demands. Consequently, conversational recommender systems emerge as a prospective research area, where an intelligent dialogue agent is integrated with a recommender system. Conversational recommender systems possess the ability to accurately understand end-users\u2019 intent or request and generate human-like dialogue responses when performing recommendations. However, existing conversational recommender systems only allow the systems to ask users for more preference information, while users\u2019 further questions and concerns about the recommended items (e.g., enquiring the location of a recommended restaurant) can hardly be addressed. Though the recent task-oriented dialogue systems allow for two-way communications, they are not easy to train because of their high dependence on human guidance in terms of user intent recognition and system response generation. Hence, to enable two-way human-machine communications and tackle the challenges brought by manually crafted rules, we propose Conversational Recommender System with Adversarial Learning (CRSAL), a novel end-to-end system to tackle the task of conversational recommendation. In CRSAL, we innovatively design a fully statistical dialogue state tracker coupled with a neural policy agent to precisely capture each user\u2019s intent from limited dialogue data and generate conversational recommendation actions. We further develop an adversarial Actor-Critic reinforcement learning approach to adaptively refine the quality of generated system actions, thus ensuring coherent human-like dialogue responses. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets fully demonstrate the superiority of CRSAL on conversational recommendation tasks.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3394592","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,13]],"date-time":"2020-06-13T16:16:07Z","timestamp":1592064967000},"page":"1-40","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":48,"title":["CRSAL"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"38","author":[{"given":"Xuhui","family":"Ren","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"The University of Queensland, Australia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Hongzhi","family":"Yin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The University of Queensland, Australia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Tong","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The University of Queensland, Australia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Hao","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Alibaba Group, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Nguyen Quoc Viet","family":"Hung","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Griffith University, Australia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Zi","family":"Huang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The University of Queensland, Australia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Xiangliang","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,13]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/5254.796083"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1162\/tacl_a_00284"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR\u201917)","author":"Bordes Antoine","year":"2017"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (IMCOM\u201918)","author":"Buck Joshua W."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_5_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D18-1547"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_6_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3166054.3166058"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_7_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP\u201919)","author":"Chen Q.","year":"2019"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_8_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Conference on Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS\u201918)","author":"Chen Tianqi"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_9_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDE.2019.00035"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_10_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDE48307.2020.00125"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_11_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding. 120--125","author":"Chen Y.","year":"2013"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_12_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2846092"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_13_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD\u201918)","author":"Christakopoulou Konstantina","year":"1981"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_14_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ijhcs.2016.10.008"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_15_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1864708.1864721"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_16_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P17-4017"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_17_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P17-1045"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_18_1","volume-title":"Multi-domain dialogue state corrections and state tracking baselines. 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