Sunhao Dai — Page 3 | Search arXiv

arXiv2023

Uncovering ChatGPT's Capabilities in Recommender Systems

The debut of ChatGPT has recently attracted the attention of the natural language processing (NLP) community and beyond. Existing studies have demonstrated that ChatGPT shows significant improvement in a range of downstream NLP tasks, but the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT in terms of recommendations remain unclear. In this study, we aim to conduct an empirical analysis of ChatGPT's recommendation ability from an Information Retrieval (IR) perspective, including point-wise, pair-wise, and list-wise ranking. To achieve this goal, we re-formulate the above three recommendation policies into a domain-specific prompt format. Through extensive experiments on four datasets from different domains, we demonstrate that ChatGPT outperforms other large language models across all three ranking policies. Based on the analysis of unit cost improvements, we identify that ChatGPT with list-wise ranking achieves the best trade-off between cost and performance compared to point-wise and pair-wise ranking. Moreover, ChatGPT shows the potential for mitigating the cold start problem and explainable recommendation. To facilitate further explorations in this area, the full code and detailed original results are open-sourced at https://github.com/rainym00d/LLM4RS.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

A Semi-Synthetic Dataset Generation Framework for Causal Inference in Recommender Systems

Accurate recommendation and reliable explanation are two key issues for modern recommender systems. However, most recommendation benchmarks only concern the prediction of user-item ratings while omitting the underlying causes behind the ratings. For example, the widely-used Yahoo!R3 dataset contains little information on the causes of the user-movie ratings. A solution could be to conduct surveys and require the users to provide such information. In practice, the user surveys can hardly avoid compliance issues and sparse user responses, which greatly hinders the exploration of causality-based recommendation. To better support the studies of causal inference and further explanations in recommender systems, we propose a novel semi-synthetic data generation framework for recommender systems where causal graphical models with missingness are employed to describe the causal mechanism of practical recommendation scenarios. To illustrate the use of our framework, we construct a semi-synthetic dataset with Causal Tags And Ratings (CTAR), based on the movies as well as their descriptive tags and rating information collected from a famous movie rating website. Using the collected data and the causal graph, the user-item-ratings and their corresponding user-item-tags are automatically generated, which provides the reasons (selected tags) why the user rates the items. Descriptive statistics and baseline results regarding the CTAR dataset are also reported. The proposed data generation framework is not limited to recommendation, and the released APIs can be used to generate customized datasets for other research tasks.

cs.IR↗