Acquiring user profiles from implicit feedback in a conversational recommender system

Abstract

Query revisions in a conversational system can be efficiently computed by assuming that the profiles of the potential users are in a predefined, a priori known and finite set. However, without any additional knowledge of the actual profiles distribution, the system may miss the true profiles of the users, hence deteriorating the system performance. We propose a method for identifying a tailored set of profiles that is acquired by analysing the implicitly shown preferences of the users that interacted with the system. We show that with the proposed method the system can efficiently identify good query revisions. © 2013 ACM.