Conversational recommender systems are an emerging area that has garnered increasing interest in the community, especially with the advancements in large language models (LLMs) that enable sophisticated handling of conversational input. Despite the progress, the field still has many aspects left to explore. The currently available public datasets for conversational recommendation lack specific user preferences and explanations for recommendations, hindering high-quality recommendations. To address such challenges, we present a novel conversational recommendation dataset named PEARL, synthesized with persona- and knowledge-augmented LLM simulators. We obtain detailed persona and knowledge from real-world reviews and construct a large-scale dataset with over 57k dialogues. Our experimental results demonstrate that PEARL contains more specific user preferences, show expertise in the target domain, and provides recommendations more relevant to the dialogue context than those in prior datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of PEARL by showing that our downstream models outperform baselines in both human and automatic evaluations. We release our dataset and code.

In the task of aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP), generative methods for predicting sentiment quads have shown promisingresults. However, they still suffer from imprecise predictions and limited interpretability, caused by data scarcity and inadequate modeling of the quadruplet composition process. In this paper, we propose Self-Consistent Reasoning-based Aspect sentiment quadruple Prediction (SCRAP), optimizing its model to generate reasonings and the corresponding sentiment quadruplets in sequence. SCRAP adopts the Extract-Then-Assign reasoning strategy, which closely mimics human cognition. In the end, SCRAP significantly improves the model’s ability to handle complex reasoning tasks and correctly predict quadruplets through consistency voting, resulting in enhanced interpretability and accuracy in ASQP.