Soliciting User Preferences in Conversational Recommender Systems via Usage-related Questions

Conversational Recommender Systems are recommender systems that utilize multi-turn interactions in order to help users find items of interest. Their advantage over traditional, one-shot recommender systems lies in their ability to elicit and adapt to the changing user preference in real time. Common approaches to eliciting user preferences include asking about items and item attributes. This strategies can fail, if the user does not have the prerequisite knowledge about the item or item attributes but they know what they plan to use the item for. In this thesis we propose a novel approach to eliciting preferences by asking implicit questions based on item usage. We identify the sentences form a large corpora of user reviews that contain information about item usage. Based on those sentences and by utilizing crowd workers, we generate questions that could be used in an preference elicitation setting. Lastly, based on the labelled dataset, we train a large neural model to automatically generate question for any viable sentence in the corpus. Using standard metrics for automatic evaluations of generated questions and manual evaluation, we demonstrate the potential viability of such a system in a production setting. Finally, we identify clusters of questions where the system fails