Acquiring User Profiles from Implicit Feedback in a

Conversational Recommender System

Henry Blanco Francesco Ricci
Free University of Bolzano Free University of Bolzano
Bolzano, Italy Bolzano, Italy
hblancolores@stud-inf.unibz.it fricci@unibz.it

Motivations Research Goals

 In a conversational recommender system personalized
query revisions can be efficiently computed by maintaining a
finite set of profiles – assumed to be the profiles of the users
that may interact with the system.
 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.
 Incrementally generate a set of profiles that are as close as
possible to the true users’ profiles - by analyzing the implicitly
shown preferences of the users that interacted with the system.
 Using the generated user profiles the system must be able
to efficiently identify good query revisions adapted to the target
user's inferred preferences, i.e., derived analyzing the queries
selected during the interaction process.

Note: A query q in Candidates is dominated if there exist q’ in

Approach Candidates such that: Util w ( q ) > Util w ( q )}, for all the profiles in P
'

satisfying 𝚽u.
 A query is represented as a Boolean vector: q = (q1 ,..., qn )
5. The AdviseSet is finally filtered by just keeping the top K queries
 A user profile is defined as: w = ( w1 ,..., wn ) with the largest expected utility.
 The utility of a query q for a user w is computed as: 6. The above steps are repeated until no more suggestions can be
n
Utilw (q ) = ∑ wi × f i (q ). ( fi(q) is a value function on qi ) generated or the user does not want more suggestions.
i =1

Query Suggestions Procedure Experiments

1. The system infers constraints 𝚽u on a specific user's profile  We conducted several experiments where 500 virtual
by observing the user selected query qs among those users interacted with our system.
suggested qi:

Note: The system contemplates a finite number of user profiles P

(initially small) which is expanded anytime no profile is found to
satisfy the constraints in 𝚽u (failure point).

2. At a failure point the acquisition of one or more profiles is

made by generating profiles wj (j=1,..,l) which satisfy 𝚽u. Figure 2:
Then wj are included in P. Experiment
description.
Interactions
3. Then new query suggestions (Candidates queries) are
between 500
generated using some query editing operators. users and our
system.
 q’=add1(q,i) q = 0100
 q’=trade1,2(q,i,j,k)
 q’=add2(q,i,j) q’ = 1100 q’ = 1011  We examined the impact of the number of acquired
 q’=trade1,3(q,i,j,k,t) q’ = 1010 q’ = 0111 profiles on the quality of the system suggestions.
 We observed the computation time of query revisions
4. Then AdviseSet = Candidates \ Dominated and compared these values with the computation time
needed when no acquisition of profiles is made.

Results
 Identifying a set of profiles close to the true user’s profile is
harder when the users are clustered in several groups and when
the users in each group are more diverse.
 Acquiring few well selected profiles every time the system fails
to generate query suggestions yields a faster convergence to better
performances (see Figure 3).
 The computation time for generating query suggestions is
roughly 4 times smaller than when a predefined set of uniformly
distributed profiles is used.

Future Work
 Bootstrapping the system with a better a priori distribution of
user profiles.
 Devising a solution for removing profiles that are not implicitly
shown by the users approaching the system, i.e., managing the
dynamic change of the distribution of the users’ preferences.
Figure 3: Average utility shortfall (difference in utility) in simulated interactions.

ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. October 12-16, 2013, Hong Kong, China.