You Sound Like Someone Who Watches Drama Movies: Towards Predicting Movie Preferences from Conversational Interactions

Sergey Volokhin, Joyce Ho, Oleg Rokhlenko, Eugene Agichtein


Abstract
The increasing popularity of voice-based personal assistants provides new opportunities for conversational recommendation. One particularly interesting area is movie recommendation, which can benefit from an open-ended interaction with the user, through a natural conversation. We explore one promising direction for conversational recommendation: mapping a conversational user, for whom there is limited or no data available, to most similar external reviewers, whose preferences are known, by representing the conversation as a user’s interest vector, and adapting collaborative filtering techniques to estimate the current user’s preferences for new movies. We call our proposed method ConvExtr (Conversational Collaborative Filtering using External Data), which 1) infers a user’s sentiment towards an entity from the conversation context, and 2) transforms the ratings of “similar” external reviewers to predict the current user’s preferences. We implement these steps by adapting contextual sentiment prediction techniques, and domain adaptation, respectively. To evaluate our method, we develop and make available a finely annotated dataset of movie recommendation conversations, which we call MovieSent. Our results demonstrate that ConvExtr can improve the accuracy of predicting users’ ratings for new movies by exploiting conversation content and external data.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.246
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3091–3096
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.246
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.246
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sergey Volokhin, Joyce Ho, Oleg Rokhlenko, and Eugene Agichtein. 2021. You Sound Like Someone Who Watches Drama Movies: Towards Predicting Movie Preferences from Conversational Interactions. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3091–3096, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
You Sound Like Someone Who Watches Drama Movies: Towards Predicting Movie Preferences from Conversational Interactions (Volokhin et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.246.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.246.mp4
Code
 sergey-volokhin/conversational-movies