Research on Conversational Recommender System Considering Consumer Types

TL;DR

This paper introduces CT-CRS, a novel conversational recommender system that models consumer types based on decision-making styles and knowledge levels, improving personalization and efficiency in multi-turn dialogues.

Contribution

The paper presents a framework that automatically infers user types in real-time and integrates this into dialogue policies using IRL, advancing personalized CRS with psychological insights.

Findings

Improved recommendation success rate on multiple datasets.

Reduced number of interaction turns for better user experience.

Both consumer type modeling and IRL significantly enhance performance.

Abstract

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) provide personalized services through multi-turn interactions, yet most existing methods overlook users' heterogeneous decision-making styles and knowledge levels, which constrains both accuracy and efficiency. To address this gap, we propose CT-CRS (Consumer Type-Enhanced Conversational Recommender System), a framework that integrates consumer type modeling into dialogue recommendation. Based on consumer type theory, we define four user categories--dependent, efficient, cautious, and expert--derived from two dimensions: decision-making style (maximizers vs. satisficers) and knowledge level (high vs. low). CT-CRS employs interaction histories and fine-tunes the large language model to automatically infer user types in real time, avoiding reliance on static questionnaires. We incorporate user types into state representation and design a type-adaptive policy that dynamically adjusts recommendation granularity, diversity, and attribute query complexity. To further optimize the dialogue policy, we adopt Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), enabling the agent to approximate expert-like strategies conditioned on consumer type. Experiments on LastFM, Amazon-Book, and Yelp show that CTCRS improves recommendation success rate and reduces interaction turns compared to strong baselines. Ablation studies confirm that both consumer type modeling and IRL contribute significantly to performance gains. These results demonstrate that CT-CRS offers a scalable and interpretable solution for enhancing CRS personalization through the integration of psychological modeling and advanced policy optimization.