Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions

Lei Li, Yongfeng Zhang, Dugang Liu, Li Chen


Abstract
Large language models (LLM) not only have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) but also have the potential to reshape many other fields, e.g., recommender systems (RS). However, most of the related work treats an LLM as a component of the conventional recommendation pipeline (e.g., as a feature extractor), which may not be able to fully leverage the generative power of LLM. Instead of separating the recommendation process into multiple stages, such as score computation and re-ranking, this process can be simplified to one stage with LLM: directly generating recommendations from the complete pool of items. This survey reviews the progress, methods, and future directions of LLM-based generative recommendation by examining three questions: 1) What generative recommendation is, 2) Why RS should advance to generative recommendation, and 3) How to implement LLM-based generative recommendation for various RS tasks. We hope that this survey can provide the context and guidance needed to explore this interesting and emerging topic.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.886
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
10146–10159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.886
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lei Li, Yongfeng Zhang, Dugang Liu, and Li Chen. 2024. Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 10146–10159, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions (Li et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.886.pdf