Taxonomy-Guided Zero-Shot Recommendations with LLMs

Yueqing Liang, Liangwei Yang, Chen Wang, Xiongxiao Xu, Philip S. Yu, Kai Shu


Abstract
With the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and their ability to perform a variety of tasks, their application in recommender systems (RecSys) has shown promise. However, we are facing significant challenges when deploying LLMs into RecSys, such as limited prompt length, unstructured item information, and un-constrained generation of recommendations, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel Taxonomy-guided Recommendation (TaxRec) framework to empower LLM with category information in a systematic approach. Specifically, TaxRec features a two-step process: one-time taxonomy categorization and LLM-based recommendation. In the one-time taxonomy categorization phase, we organize and categorize items, ensuring clarity and structure of item information. In the LLM-based recommendation phase, we feed the structured items into LLM prompts, achieving efficient token utilization and controlled feature generation. This enables more accurate, contextually relevant, and zero-shot recommendations without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that TaxRec significantly enhances recommendation quality compared to traditional zero-shot approaches, showcasing its efficacy as a personal recommender with LLMs. Code is available at: https://github.com/yueqingliang1/TaxRec.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.102
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1520–1530
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.102/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yueqing Liang, Liangwei Yang, Chen Wang, Xiongxiao Xu, Philip S. Yu, and Kai Shu. 2025. Taxonomy-Guided Zero-Shot Recommendations with LLMs. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1520–1530, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Taxonomy-Guided Zero-Shot Recommendations with LLMs (Liang et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.102.pdf