学术讲座

大数据管理与分析方法研究北京市重点实验室（BDAI）研究生沙龙由金沙威尼斯欢乐娱人城师生组织定期举行。11月23日研讨会由学院赵鑫教授指导的博士生王晓磊和徐君教授指导的博士生徐晨分别介绍自己的研究工作。欢迎同学们积极参与研讨！

报告题目：Towards Unified Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge-Enhanced Prompt Learning

讲者：王晓磊，博士二年级，

导师：赵鑫

研究方向：对话式信息获取

Abstract: Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to proactively elicit user preference and recommend high-quality items through natural language conversations. Typically, a CRS consists of a recommendation module to predict preferred items for users and a conversation module to generate appropriate responses. To develop an effective CRS, it is essential to seamlessly integrate the two modules. Existing works either design semantic alignment strategies, or share knowledge resources and representations between the two modules. However, these approaches still rely on different architectures or techniques to develop the two modules, making it difficult for effective module integration. To address this problem, we propose a unified CRS model named UniCRS based on knowledge-enhanced prompt learning. Our approach unifies the recommendation and conversation subtasks into the prompt learning paradigm, and utilizes knowledge-enhanced prompts based on a fixed pre-trained language model (PLM) to fulfill both subtasks in a unified approach. In the prompt design, we include fused knowledge representations, task-specific soft tokens, and the dialogue context, which can provide sufficient contextual information to adapt the PLM for the CRS task. Besides, for the recommendation subtask, we also incorporate the generated response template as an important part of the prompt, to enhance the information interaction between the two subtasks. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is publicly available at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/UniCRS.

报告题目：Dually Enhanced Propensity Score Estimation in Sequential Recommendation

讲者：徐晨，博士二年级

导师：徐君

研究方向：推荐系统，公平性与可解释性

Abstract: Sequential recommender systems train their models based on a large amount of implicit user feedback data and may be subject to biases when users are systematically under/over-exposed to certain items. Unbiased learning based on inverse propensity scores (IPS), which estimate the probability of observing a user-item pair given the historical information, has been proposed to address the issue. In these methods, propensity score estimation is usually limited to the view of item, that is, treating the feedback data as sequences of items that interacted with the users. However, the feedback data can also be treated from the view of user, as the sequences of users that interact with the items. Moreover, the two views can jointly enhance the propensity score estimation. Inspired by the observation, we propose to estimate the propensity scores from the views of user and item, called Dually Enhanced Propensity Score Estimation (DEPS). Specifically, given a target user-item pair and the corresponding item and user interaction sequences, DEPS firstly constructs a time-aware causal graph to represent the user-item observational probability. According to the graph, two complementary propensity scores are estimated from the views of item and user, respectively, based on the same set of user feedback data. Finally, two transformers are designed to make the final preference prediction. Theoretical analysis showed the unbiasedness and variance of DEPS.