Beyond Texts: Incorporating Co-occurrences into the Review-based Conversation Recommendation Systems

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) interact with users through natural language to provide recommendations and generate responses. Due to limited information in conversation, existing works utilize KGs or reviews to improve CRS. Despite achievements, they overlook co-occurrence relations which have shown effectiveness in collaborative filtering systems. In this work, we first propose a novel framework named CoCRS, aiming to incorporate Co-occurrences into the Review-based Conversation Recommendation Systems. In CoCRS, we mine co-occurrences from two aspects: (1) item and entity, (2) user and item. For the first one, we extract entities from redundant review texts by KG and construct a relation-aware item-entity heterogeneous graph. In the second aspect, we analyze review sentiments and construct a sentiment-aware user-item bipartite graph. We encode two graphs to obtain user and entity embeddings. Since users in CRS are anonymous, we generate a virtual similar user representation to match reviews with users. Besides, we capture time-aware preference representation from two-time dimensions. Finally, we generate word-level user representation with word-oriented KG and model user preference by integrating the above representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoCRS outperforms baselines and the cold-start experiment highlights its robustness. The Large Language Model (LLM) experiment illustrates the significant role of co-occurrence relationships in LLM-based CRS. Our code are available at https://github.com/Qin-lab-code/CoCRS.