Bayesian Preference Elicitation with Keyphrase-Item Coembeddings for Interactive Recommendation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interactive (a.k.a. conversational) recommendation systems provide the potential capability to personalize interactions with increasingly prevalent dialog-based AI assistants. In the conversational recommendation setting, a user often has long-term preferences inferred from previous interactions along with ephemeral session-based preferences that need to be efficiently elicited through minimal interaction. Historically, Bayesian preference elicitation methods have proved effective for (i) leveraging prior information to incrementally estimate uncertainty in user preferences as new information is observed, and for (ii) supporting active elicitation of preference feedback to quickly zero in on the best recommendations in a session. Previous work typically focused on eliciting preferences in the space of items or a small set of attributes; in the dialog-based setting, however, we are faced with the task of eliciting preferences in the space of natural language while using this feedback to determine a user’s preferences in item space. To address this task in the era of modern, latent embedding-based recommender systems, we propose a method for coembedding user-item preferences with keyphrase descriptions (i.e., not explicitly known attributes, but rather subjective judgments mined from user reviews or tags) along with a closed-form Bayesian methodology for incrementally estimating uncertainty in user preferences based on elicited keyphrase feedback. We then combine this framework with well-known preference elicitation techniques that can leverage Bayesian posteriors such as Upper Confidence Bounds, Thompson Sampling, and a variety of other methods. Our empirical evaluation on real-world datasets shows that the proposed query selection strategies effectively update user beliefs, leading to high-quality recommendations with a minimal number of keyphrase queries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".