SimInter: Evidence-Grounded User Simulation with Interview-Based Profile Enrichment for Conversational Recommender Systems
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) require reliable user simulators for cost-effective evaluation. LLM-based simulators have made realistic simulation possible but typically condition on profiles derived from explicit ratings, demographics, and static sources capturing surface preferences while omitting implicit behavioral characteristics such as decision-making style, aspect-level preferences, and domain expertise. We propose SimInter, a pipeline that elicits these attributes via synthetic interviews between two LLM agents, grounded in the user's statistical profile and historical conversational evidence. Before profile enrichment, an audit agent explicitly flags potential fabrication and stereotyping at the turn level. We instantiate and evaluate SimInter on movie recommendation. We simulate 300 ReDial users and, on a matched subset of 100 users, compare SimInter with a statistics-only baseline: SimInter significantly increases the diversity of expressed preference aspects (filtered aspect entropy: 1.619 vs. 0.859; paired d = 0.96, Holm-adjusted p < 0.001). This gain persists when the simulator converses with two trained recommenders, KBRD and UniCRS, under two independent evaluation judges (+0.28 to +0.56 nats; all p < 0.001). Human evaluation finds 94.3% of enriched-attribute claims supported or partially supported, while human judgments agree with 95.2% of the auditor's binary filtering decisions on a stratified sample.