Beyond Persuasion: Towards Conversational Recommender System with Credible Explanations

Peixin Qin, Chen Huang, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Tat-Seng Chua


Abstract
With the aid of large language models, current conversational recommender system (CRS) has gaining strong abilities to persuade users to accept recommended items. While these CRSs are highly persuasive, they can mislead users by incorporating incredible information in their explanations, ultimately damaging the long-term trust between users and the CRS. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, called PC-CRS, to enhance the credibility of CRS’s explanations during persuasion. It guides the explanation generation through our proposed credibility-aware persuasive strategies and then gradually refines explanations via post-hoc self-reflection. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of PC-CRS in promoting persuasive and credible explanations. Further analysis reveals the reason behind current methods producing incredible explanations and the potential of credible explanations to improve recommendation accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.247
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4264–4282
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.247
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peixin Qin, Chen Huang, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2024. Beyond Persuasion: Towards Conversational Recommender System with Credible Explanations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 4264–4282, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Persuasion: Towards Conversational Recommender System with Credible Explanations (Qin et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.247.pdf