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FairCRS: Towards User-oriented Fairness in Conversational Recommendation Systems

Published: 08 October 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRSs) enable recommender systems to explicitly acquire user preferences during multi-turn interactions, providing more accurate and personalized recommendations. However, the data imbalance in CRSs, due to inconsistent interaction history among users, may lead to disparate treatment for disadvantaged user groups. In this paper, we investigate the discriminate problems in CRS from the user’s perspective, called as user-oriented fairness. To reveal the unfairness problems of different user groups in CRS, we conduct extensive empirical analyses. To mitigate user unfairness, we propose a user-oriented fairness framework, named FairCRS, which is a model-agnostic framework. In particular, we develop a user-embedding reconstruction mechanism that enriches user embeddings by incorporating more interaction information, and design a user-oriented fairness strategy that optimizes the recommendation quality differences among user groups while alleviating unfairness. Extensive experimental results on English and Chinese datasets show that FairCRS outperforms state-of-the-art CRSs in terms of overall recommendation performance and user fairness.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    RecSys '24: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
    October 2024
    1438 pages
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    Published: 08 October 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. Bias of Conversational Recommender Systems
    2. Fair Conversational Recommendation System
    3. Trustworthy Conversational Recommendation Systems
    4. User Fairness

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