SCREEN : a benchmark for situated conversational recommendation

Abstract

Engaging in conversational recommendations within a specific scenario represents a promising paradigm in the real world. Scenario-relevant situations often affect conversations and recommendations from two closely related aspects: varying the appealingness of items to users, namely situated item representation, and shifting user interests in the targeted items, namely situated user preference. We highlight that considering those situational factors is crucial, as this aligns with the realistic conversational recommendation process in the physical world. However, it is challenging yet under-explored. In this work, we are pioneering to bridge this gap and introduce a novel setting: Situated Conversational Recommendation Systems (SCRS). We observe an emergent need for high-quality datasets, and building one from scratch requires tremendous human effort. To this end, we construct a new benchmark, named SCREEN, via a role-playing method based on multimodal large language models. We take two multimodal large language models to play the roles of a user and a recommender, simulating their interactions in a co-observed scene. Our SCREEN comprises over 20k dialogues across 1.5k diverse situations, providing a rich foundation for exploring situational influences on conversational recommendations. Based on the SCREEN, we propose three worth-exploring subtasks and evaluate several representative baseline models. Our evaluations suggest that the benchmark is high quality, establishing a solid experimental basis for future research. The code and data are available at https://github.com/DongdingLin/SCREEN.