Multi-Domain Recommendation to Attract Users via Domain Preference Modeling

Recently, web platforms have been operating various service domains simultaneously. Targeting a platform that operates multiple service domains, we introduce a new task, Multi-Domain Recommendation to Attract Users (MDRAU), which recommends items from multiple ``unseen'' domains with which each user has not interacted yet, by using knowledge from the user's ``seen'' domains. In this paper, we point out two challenges of MDRAU task. First, there are numerous possible combinations of mappings from seen to unseen domains because users have usually interacted with a different subset of service domains. Second, a user might have different preferences for each of the target unseen domains, which requires that recommendations reflect the user's preferences on domains as well as items. To tackle these challenges, we propose DRIP framework that models users' preferences at two levels (i.e., domain and item) and learns various seen-unseen domain mappings in a unified way with masked domain modeling. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DRIP in MDRAU task and its ability to capture users' domain-level preferences.

Exploring Language Model's Code Generation Ability with Auxiliary Functions

Auxiliary function is a helpful component to improve language model's code generation ability. However, a systematic exploration of how they affect has yet to be done. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate the ability to utilize auxiliary functions encoded in recent code-pretrained language models. First, we construct a human-crafted evaluation set, called HumanExtension, which contains examples of two functions where one function assists the other. With HumanExtension, we design several experiments to examine their ability in a multifaceted way. Our evaluation processes enable a comprehensive understanding of including auxiliary functions in the prompt in terms of effectiveness and robustness. An additional implementation style analysis captures the models' various implementation patterns when they access the auxiliary function. Through this analysis, we discover the models' promising ability to utilize auxiliary functions including their self-improving behavior by implementing the two functions step-by-step. However, our analysis also reveals the model's underutilized behavior to call the auxiliary function, suggesting the future direction to enhance their implementation by eliciting the auxiliary function call ability encoded in the models. We release our code and dataset to facilitate this research direction.

Pearl: A Review-driven Persona-Knowledge Grounded Conversational Recommendation Dataset

Conversational recommender system is an emerging area that has garnered an increasing interest in the community, especially with the advancements in large language models (LLMs) that enable diverse reasoning over conversational input. Despite the progress, the field has many aspects left to explore. The currently available public datasets for conversational recommendation lack specific user preferences and explanations for recommendations, hindering high-quality recommendations. To address such challenges, we present a novel conversational recommendation dataset named PEARL, synthesized with persona- and knowledge-augmented LLM simulators. We obtain detailed persona and knowledge from real-world reviews and construct a large-scale dataset with over 57k dialogues. Our experimental results demonstrate that utterances in PEARL include more specific user preferences, show expertise in the target domain, and provide recommendations more relevant to the dialogue context than those in prior datasets.

Improving Retrieval in Theme-specific Applications using a Corpus Topical Taxonomy

Document retrieval has greatly benefited from the advancements of large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, their effectiveness is often limited in theme-specific applications for specialized areas or industries, due to unique terminologies, incomplete contexts of user queries, and specialized search intents. To capture the theme-specific information and improve retrieval, we propose to use a corpus topical taxonomy, which outlines the latent topic structure of the corpus while reflecting user-interested aspects. We introduce ToTER (Topical Taxonomy Enhanced Retrieval) framework, which identifies the central topics of queries and documents with the guidance of the taxonomy, and exploits their topical relatedness to supplement missing contexts. As a plug-and-play framework, ToTER can be flexibly employed to enhance various PLM-based retrievers. Through extensive quantitative, ablative, and exploratory experiments on two real-world datasets, we ascertain the benefits of using topical taxonomy for retrieval in theme-specific applications and demonstrate the effectiveness of ToTER.

Evidence-Focused Fact Summarization for Knowledge-Augmented Zero-Shot Question Answering

Recent studies have investigated utilizing Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to enhance Quesetion Answering (QA) performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet structured KG verbalization remains challengin. Existing methods, such as triple-form or free-form textual conversion of triple-form facts, encounter several issues. These include reduced evidence density due to duplicated entities or relationships, and reduced evidence clarity due to an inability to emphasize crucial evidence. To address these issues, we propose EFSum, an Evidence-focused Fact Summarization framework for enhanced QA with knowledge-augmented LLMs. We optimize an open-source LLM as a fact summarizer through distillation and preference alignment. Our extensive experiments show that EFSum improves LLM's zero-shot QA performance, and it is possible to ensure both the helpfulness and faithfulness of the summary.

Ever-Evolving Memory by Blending and Refining the Past

For a human-like chatbot, constructing a long-term memory is crucial. A naive approach for making a memory could be simply listing the summarized dialogue. However, this can lead to problems when the speaker's status change over time and contradictory information gets accumulated. It is important that the memory stays organized to lower the confusion for the response generator. In this paper, we propose a novel memory scheme for long-term conversation, CREEM. Unlike existing approaches that construct memory based solely on current sessions, our proposed model blending past memories during memory formation. Additionally, we introduce refining process to handle redundant or outdated information. This innovative approach seeks for overall improvement and coherence of chatbot responses by ensuring a more informed and dynamically evolving long-term memory.

Self-Consistent Reasoning-based Aspect-Sentiment Quad Prediction with Extract-Then-Assign Strategy

In the task of aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP), generative methods for predicting sentiment quads have shown promising results. However, they still suffer from imprecise predictions and limited interpretability, caused by data scarcity and inadequate modeling of the quadruplet composition process. In this paper, we propose Self-Consistent Reasoning-based Aspect-sentiment quadruple Prediction (SCRAP), optimizing its model to generate reasonings and the corresponding sentiment quadruplets in sequence. SCRAP adopts the Extract-Then-Assign reasoning strategy, which closely mimics human cognition. In the end, SCRAP significantly improves the model's ability to handle complex reasoning tasks and correctly predict quadruplets through consistency voting, resulting in enhanced interpretability and accuracy in ASQP.

VerifiNER: Verification-augmented NER via Knowledge-grounded Reasoning with Large Language Models

Recent approaches in domain-specific named entity recognition (NER), such as biomedical NER, have shown remarkable advances. However, they still lack of faithfulness, producing erroneous predictions. We assume that knowledge of entities can be useful in verifying the correctness of the predictions. Despite the usefulness of knowledge, resolving such errors with knowledge is nontrivial, since the knowledge itself does not directly indicate the ground-truth label. To this end, we propose VerifiNER, a post-hoc verification framework that identifies errors from existing NER methods using knowledge and revises them into more faithful predictions. Our framework leverages the reasoning abilities of large language models to adequately ground on knowledge and the contextual information in the verification process. We validate effectiveness of VerifiNER through extensive experiments on biomedical datasets. The results suggest that VerifiNER can successfully verify errors from existing models as a model-agnostic approach. Further analyses on out-of-domain and low-resource settings show the usefulness of VerifiNER on real-world applications.

COCOA: CBT-based Conversational Counseling Agent using Memory Specialized in Cognitive Distortions and Dynamic Prompt

The demand for conversational agents that provide mental health care is consistently increasing. In this work, we develop a psychological counseling agent, referred to as CoCoA, that applies Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques to identify and address cognitive distortions inherent in the client's statements. Specifically, we construct a memory system to efficiently manage information necessary for counseling while extracting high-level insights about the client from their utterances. Additionally, to ensure that the counseling agent generates appropriate responses, we introduce dynamic prompting to flexibly apply CBT techniques and facilitate the appropriate retrieval of information. We conducted dialogues between CoCoA and characters from Character.ai, creating a dataset for evaluation. Then, we asked GPT to evaluate the constructed counseling dataset, and our model demonstrated a statistically significant difference from other models.

Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a task aimed at alleviating individuals' emotional distress through daily conversation. Given its inherent complexity and non-intuitive nature, ESConv dataset incorporates support strategies to facilitate the generation of appropriate responses. Recently, despite the remarkable conversational ability of large language models (LLMs), previous studies have suggested that they often struggle with providing useful emotional support. Hence, this work initially analyzes the results of LLMs on ESConv, revealing challenges in selecting the correct strategy and a notable preference for a specific strategy. Motivated by these, we explore the impact of the inherent preference in LLMs on providing emotional support, and consequently, we observe that exhibiting high preference for specific strategies hinders effective emotional support, aggravating its robustness in predicting the appropriate strategy. Moreover, we conduct a methodological study to offer insights into the necessary approaches for LLMs to serve as proficient emotional supporters. Our findings emphasize that (1) low preference for specific strategies hinders the progress of emotional support, (2) external assistance helps reduce preference bias, and (3) LLMs alone cannot become good emotional supporters. These insights suggest promising avenues for future research to enhance the emotional intelligence of LLMs.