A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and
control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time
multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an
unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and
common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of
this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new
technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a
complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These
issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of
conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for
building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose
new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue
management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated
architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an
LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to
modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in
the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a
controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a
proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos
built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through
some illustrative example conversations.

本文提出了一个使用大型语言模型的端到端大规模语音推荐系统，并介绍了一些技术和实现细节，包括用户偏好理解、灵活对话管理、基于 LLM 的用户仿真器等。