Heejin Kook  Seongmin Park  Jongwuk Lee

10.5626/JOK.2025.52.7.617

conversational recommender system Large Language Model Recommendation System data augmentation

Conversational recommender systems provide personalized recommendations through bi-directional interactions with users. Traditional conversational recommender systems rely on external knowledge, such as knowledge graphs, to effectively capture user preferences. While recent rapid advancement of large language models has enabled zero-shot recommendations, challenges remain in understanding users' implicit preferences and designing optimal reasoning paths. To address these limitations, this study investigates the importance of appropriate reasoning path construction in zero-shot based conversational recommender systems and explores the potential of using a new approach based on this foundation. The proposed framework consists of two stages: (1) comprehensively extracting both explicit and implicit preferences from conversational context, and (2) constructing reasoning trees to select optimal reasoning paths based on these preferences. Experimental results on benchmark datasets INSPIRED and ReDial show that our proposed method achieves up to 11.77% improvement in Recall@10 compared to existing zero-shot methods, It even outperforms some learning-based models.