Minimalist and High-performance Conversational Recommendation with Uncertainty Estimation for User Preference

Conversational recommendation system (CRS) is emerging as a user-friendly way to capture users' dynamic preferences over candidate items and attributes. Multi-shot CRS is designed to make recommendations multiple times until the user either accepts the recommendation or leaves at the end of their patience. Existing works are trained with reinforcement learning (RL), which may suffer from unstable learning and prohibitively high demands for computing. In this work, we propose a simple and efficient CRS, MInimalist Non-reinforced Interactive COnversational Recommender Network (MINICORN). MINICORN models the epistemic uncertainty of the estimated user preference and queries the user for the attribute with the highest uncertainty. The system employs a simple network architecture and makes the query-vs-recommendation decision using a single rule. Somewhat surprisingly, this minimalist approach outperforms state-of-the-art RL methods on three real-world datasets by large margins. We hope that MINICORN will serve as a valuable baseline for future research.