Towards Personalized Conversational Sales Agents: Contextual User Profiling for Strategic Action

Tongyoung Kim, Jeongeun Lee, SooJin Yoon, SungHwan Kim, Dongha Lee


Abstract
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to engage users in dialogue to provide tailored recommendations. While traditional CRSs focus on eliciting preferences and retrieving items, real-world e-commerce interactions involve more complex decision-making, where users consider multiple factors beyond simple attributes. To capture this complexity, we introduce Conversational Sales (CSALES), a novel task that integrates preference elicitation, recommendation, and persuasion within a unified conversational framework. To support realistic and systematic evaluation, we present CSUSER, an evaluation protocol with LLM-based user simulator grounded in real-world behavioral data by modeling fine-grained user profiles for personalized interaction. We also propose CSI, a conversational sales agent that proactively infers contextual user profiles and strategically selects actions through conversation. Comprehensive experiments show that CSI significantly improves both recommendation success and persuasive effectiveness across diverse user profiles.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.275
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5131–5154
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.275/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Tongyoung Kim, Jeongeun Lee, SooJin Yoon, SungHwan Kim, and Dongha Lee. 2025. Towards Personalized Conversational Sales Agents: Contextual User Profiling for Strategic Action. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 5131–5154, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Personalized Conversational Sales Agents: Contextual User Profiling for Strategic Action (Kim et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.275.pdf
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